HONEST JOHN VANE

JLEGE

AVILA COLLEGE

55924

De I'orest, Jcfc William
Honest JK'ji Vane

HONEST JOHH VANE; [NOVEL] WTIH
DE OTEST, JOM WILLIAM

0SCARO

FIC/D362H

MONUMENT EDITION

AV1LA COLLhGE LIBRARY
/. W. D^ FOREST

with an introduction by JOSEPH JAY RUBIN

Copyright 1960 BALD EAGLE PRESS State College, Pa.
Printed in the United States of America
L. C, Catalog Card Number 60-5478
Designed by Eleanore Rubin

PREFACE

With eleven novels published, J. W. De Forest in 1884
began to negotiate for the printing of a uniform edition.
First refusal came from Harper and Brothers, the pub
lishers of Miss RaveneTs Conversion, Playing The Mis
chief, and Justine's Lovers, as well as an early travel
memoir. Nor could De Forest meet the Harper counter
proposal that he buy the plates at half cost and 3,211
inventory copies at cost. On 2 May 1887, after a long
stay in Europe, he tried again:

Can you not make me an offer which I can afford.
. . . The form [double columns] of Playing, The Mis
chief is now out of fashion. The plates of Miss Rav-
enel are almost the worst that I ever saw; a hundred
or a hundred and fifty gross typographical errors.
... If a library edition is to be got out, I must make
the plates at my own expense. . . . Moreover, I must
spend months in retouching the works in order to
secure a renewal of copyright and to remove some
errors in style or matter. At the best I do not hope
to sell more than will barely cover the cost of the
plates.

My only object is to leave a small monument for
myself. And I must hurry.

He had better luck with the holder of two other titles
and bought for fifty dollars the plates of Kate Beaumont
and Overland. Those of a third, The Wetherel Afair,

PREFACE

had been melted accidentally; the abashed publisher
transferred publication rights freely to the author.

William Dean Howells had virtually made a second
career out of helping and praising De Forest. As far back
as 1872 he was insisting that "we are not so much lack
ing in an American novelist as in a public to recognize
him." Now Howells tried in vain to get Ticknor to stereo
type the still-neglected work. On 2 September 1887, he
wrote a typical note to De Forest:

I've talked with a good many people about you,
and wherever I've met a sound, well-read man, he
had read and liked you. ... I may be mistaken in
thinking your books in a uniform edition would suc
ceed now; but I do believe the public has been grow
ing towards your work. The novelist is less woman-
rid than he once was, and your masculine tone would
be better liked; certainly there is a better chance
now for your realism. Good Lord! When one thinks
of Stevenson and Haggard selling their tens of thous
ands and you lacking a publisher, it is hard to be
patient.

Three years later in a renewed effort to achieve the
edition Howells turned to the owner of a popular "Li
brary" series, J. W. Lovell, whom he described as "a re
formed pirate, but so is the best of the rest, and he is
trying to publish good books." But neither Lovell nor
the despairing novelist responded with enthusiasm. De
Forest told Howells on 17 June 1890:

At present I have an idea that no publisher can
put me out successfully until we have got at least
a little bit of international copyright. ... Is Lovell
safe? I wonder. I have had three bankrupt pub
lishers, and one who suspended, and have become
suspicious.

Howells' final mention of the uniform edition came in

PREFACE

1895, this time a suggestion that De Forest try the house
whose imprint would soon go on The Red Badge of
Courage: Appleton who "have now a most enlightened
man in charge of their enterprises Ripley Hitchcock.
The publishers ought to ask you, but I am afraid you will
have to ask them." Rather than risk further rebuff, the
author of Honest John Vane, now in his seventieth year,
abandoned his plan to leave a small monument. Long
mans in 1898 did the last fiction, A Lovers Revolt; a
New Haven printer his two volumes of poetry in 1901
and 1902. But when De Forest died in 1906 he had nev
er known the satisfaction of seeing his novels gathered
in the format they deserved.

INTRODUCTION

In a letter written in January 1876, James Russell Low
ell told of his shame the past years when news from
America had reached him in Europe:

Wherever I went I was put on the defensive.
Whatever extracts I saw from American papers told
of some new fraud or defalcation, public or private.
... It was fruitless to say that the people were still
sound when the Body Politic which draws its life
from them showed such blotches and sores. I came
home, and instead of wrath at such abominations, I
found banter. . . . What fills me with doubt and dis
may is the degradation of the moral tone.

Of all the blotches on the Body Politic, the largest and
the ugliest was the Credit Mobilier. Examination by
press and two Congressional committees proved it in
fected more legislators than the Erie speculators, the
Tweed Ring, Conkling's Custom House, the sale of cadet-
ships, or any other of the many scandals that filled the
years after the Civil War. At least eight Congressmen,
including the Speaker of the House, three Senators, and
the Vice President of the United States were scarred by
exposure to what reporters called "the strategy of the
subsidy adventurers," the lobbyists of the Credit Mobi
lier. When the Wilson Committee tried in 1873 to probe
the extent of financial manipulation, its investigators

INTRODUCTION

12

found that "the books have been kept in such a way,
and the transactions have been of such a character, as
that their true nature has been very much disguised."
Cost estimates of engineers had vanished; General Gren-
ville M. Dodge refused to come to Washington to testify.
Skilled counsel, including the egregious Ben Butler, re
pudiated every charge,, clouded every fact except the
basic one that greedy men had broken the law. The
Wilson Committee concluded that the three Credit Mo-
bilier contracts for $93,546,287.28 brought a profit of
$43,925,328.34. No wonder that an expense account for
$18,000 at Willard's Hotel seemed a trifle.

In June 1862, Congress had responded with the Pa
cific Railway Act to long-demonstrated need for a con
tinental military and commercial link. In 1864, prodded
by Union Pacific lobbyists, Congress increased the boun
ty to the road builders. It was now that directors of the
Union Pacific operating not as trustees of a potential
national treasure but as private promoters began to ex
ploit the huge acreage and government currency bonds
provided by generous legislation. The device to be used,
the assigning to themselves of road-construction con
tracts, was neither legal nor novel, but it had proved
itself profitable in other parts of the country, especially
the West. The risk in this wilful disregard of law lay in
the fact that those who assumed the contracts would be
personally liable for all debts. "They therefore took steps
to procure corporate powers as a shield against such risk,
and secured for that purpose the control of a corporation
known as the Credit Mobilier." In March 1864, the Vice
President of the Union Pacific bought the charter of the
obscure Pennsylvania Agency which had been "snaked
through the Legislature" with virtually unlimited powers
to build railways in the South and the West; it was re-

INTRODUCTION
13

named prophetically after the scandal-soiled, French
joint-stock venture by one of the lobbyists with European
experience, the notorious George Francis Train. "The
Fiscal Agency," wrote a contemporary observer, "was a
chimera; the Credit Mobilier entered the skin of it as
devils possessed the crazy man." Liability would now be
limited to the amount of subscription to stock.

Within the year the Credit Mobilier, now a "corpora
tion inside of the original corporation," contracted to
build track west from Omaha for its alias, At a cost to
the Union Pacific of $12,974,416.24, the Credit Mobilier
realized a profit of $5,168,233.91. It was over the execu
tion of this first contract that the chief engineer of the
Union Pacific, Peter A. Day, resigned. He refused to
lend his name to estimates rigged higher than experience
warranted; he objected to orders from directors to in
crease costs by building unneeded heavy embankments.
His resignation "from the best position in my profession
this country has ever offered to any man" was accepted
and General Dodge replaced him. Mrs. Dodge soon
owned one hundred shares of Credit Mobilier stock.

Parts of the second contract displayed further bizarre
concepts of trusteeship. According to the Wilson Com
mittee, the Credit Mobilier charged $1,104,000 for fifty-
eight miles of track already built and accepted under the
first contract. But the terms of the third contract, the
"wildest . . . made by a civilized man" surpassed the
first two in audacity and magnitude of profit "if that
is the proper word to be used in this connection." It
would be identified as the creature of Oakes Ames, manu
facturer of shovels and plows, since 1862 a Republican
member of Congress from Massachusetts, and since a
corporate election of October 1866, in power with his
brother among the Credit Mobilier directors. On 16

INTRODUCTION

14

August 1867, Ames contracted with the Union Pacific
to build 667 miles of track for $47,000,000. Earnings
were to be split among the stockholders of the Credit
Mobilier, thereby guaranteeing profits for both parties,
for "all large stockholders in the Union Pacific were also
stockholders in the Credit Mobilier." Congressional in
quiry also proved that Ames charged the Union Pacific
from $42,000 to $96,000 per mile, and that "this contract
extended over 138 miles of road already completed and
accepted." The 138 miles had cost only $27,000 per mile
originally! As a result of receiving pay for work done
by others, the Credit Mobilier declared swift dividends;
on 12 December 1867, the operators divided "among
themselves as profits at that date, a larger sum than they
ever put at risk in the whole transaction,"

Though the stock of the Credit Mobilier, as Ames'
counsel argued, was not on the market at this time and
had "no ascertained price," all owners reasonably under
stood that the $47,000,000 contract had increased its
value. "Profits are reported to have been enormous,
reported only," wrote Charles Francis Adams, Jr., a care
ful investigator of speculation in 1869, for "throughout
all this there is nothing but hearsay and street rumor to
rely upon." Dividends, according to one of the rumors,
reached eleven hundred per cent; The Nation guessed
fifteen hundred per cent.

Contract and capital secured, Ames, who had become
interested in the Union Pacific while a member of the
Committee on Railroads in the House, now turned his
promotional energy to Washington, His mission was
twofold: the prevention of restrictive legislation to regu
late transportation rates, for Ames and his group, unlike
some of the other promoters, believed in the commercial
future of the Union Pacific; but above all Ames wanted

INTRODUCTION

15

to safeguard construction profits. With the opening of
the winter session of Congress in December 1867, ac
cording to the official record of his peers, he "entered
into contracts with a considerable number of members
of Congress, both Senators and Representatives, to let
them have shares of stock in the Credit Mobilier Com
pany, at par,, with interest thereon from the first day of
the previous July. It does not appear that in any instance
he asked any of these persons to pay a higher price than
the value and interest, nor that Mr. Ames used any special
effort or urgency to get these persons to take it."

To judge by the number of Congressional takers Ames
entered in his memorandum book, none needed special
pleading. The pre-contract price of the stock was recog
nized for the bargain it was, with a soaring value too
tempting to reject. (Washington gossip in January 1868,
had it that the stock "to anyone else but a friend of Mr.
Ames" was worth four times its par value.) And Ames
was a considerate broker: he guaranteed at least ten per
cent profit; he even advanced the total purchase price
of the stock. It proved all too easy for a fellow-legislator
after 16 August to buy at July's deflated rates, pay for
the stock from the profits accrued after 16 August and
held in reserve by Ames, and quickly realize new divi
dends without risking a cent of his own limited
($5,000) Congressional salary. The frank reason Ames
gave for using this method to safeguard the Credit Mobi
lier from government scrutiny resounded through Wash
ington and the country: "There is no difficulty in getting
men to look after their own property."

"Hoax" Ames, as the New York Herald named him,
was not the only lobbyist working to protect railroad
interests and profits, nor was there accord among the
several groups; in fact, quarrels and incriminations sped

INTRODUCTION

16

their exposure. The one-time head of the Credit Mobi
lier, Thomas C. Durant, now hostile to the Ames group,
was an old hand at influencing legislators: as Vice Presi
dent of the Union Pacific he had exhausted a "suspense
account" of $435,754.21 in winning the Railroad Act of
1864. A third member, Henry S. McComb of Delaware,
claimed in anger that he could not take care of his friends
because Ames had secured all available stock. When
McComb sued to recover 343 shares worth, in his esti
mate $300,000, the feud with Ames became public knowl
edge. Demands for official exposure of the entire Credit
Mobilier followed McComb's detailed affidavits which
charged Ames with using the stock to corrupt Congress.
There had been early airings of suspicion. Disillu
sioned like his brothers and Walt Whitman by unchecked
rapacity, Charles Francis Adams made the "legerdemain
of paper financiering" his target in the January 1869,
North American Review:

Who, then, constitute the Credit Mobilier? It is
but another name for the Pacific Railroad Ring. The
members of it are in Congress; they are trustees for
the bondholders, they are directors, they are stock
holders, they are contractors; in Congress they vote
the subsidies, in New York they receive them, on the
plains they spend them, and in the Credit Mobilier
they divide them. ... As stockholders they own the
road, as mortgagees they have a lien upon it, as di
rectors they contract for its construction, and as
members of the Credit Mobilier they build it.

Adams, like Andrew Johnson before him, saw the conse
quences of this "thimble-rig" operation:

Here ... is every vicious element of railroad con
struction and management; here is costly construc
tion, entailing future taxation on trade; here are tens
of millions of fictitious capital; here is a road built

INTRODUCTION
17

on the sale of its bonds, and with the aid of subsi
dies; here is every element of cost recklessly exag
gerated, and the whole at some future day is to make
itself felt as a burden on the trade which it is to
create, and will surely hereafter constitute a source
of corruption in the politics of the land, and a resist
less power in its legislature.

In April of that year, a month before Leland Stanford
drove the last spike of gold into the last tie of laurel
joining the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific at Pro
montory Point, Congress heard the first charges of fraud.
In his devious way Jim Fisk, the Erie "raider," also
staged an assault on the Credit Mobilier which brought
further notoriety. But it was the presidential campaign
of 1872 that made investigation inevitable. From the
Liberal Republicans a public response to the corrup
tion of the Grant regime the nation learned during a
"war of mud and missiles" of specific accusations. With
the Liberal Republicans led by newspaper editors as re
sponsible as Bryant, Whitelaw Reid, Henry Watterson,
and Horace White, and with the Democrats eager for
issues, the scandal could not be suppressed. In the midst
of the campaign, Dana's Sun documented charges that
the Credit Mobilier had bought its way into Congress
by reprinting Ames' letters to McComb with names of
Congressmen and numbers of their shares. When the
Forty-Second Congress met in December 1872, the House
urged by Speaker James G. Blaine, one of the alleged
buyers of stock, moved to investigate whether any mem
ber "was bribed by Oakes Ames, or any other person or
corporation, in any matter touching his legislative duty.*
A committee, named after its chairman, Judge Luke Po
land of Vermont, a respected, white-haired, white-whisk
ered "kind and generous gentleman," started to take testi
mony 12 December; it sat until 19 February 1873. Those

AVH.A COLLEGE LIBRARY

INTRODUCTION

18

who believed in portents noted that the committee room
was at the foot of a long flight of dark stairs.

Deliberating over hundreds of pages of testimony,
Judge Poland detected "painfully conflicting" statements;
he found "an entire variance" as to the transaction be
tween Ames and "Pig Iron" Kelley of Pennsylvania.
Somehow the committee concluded that Ames was "guilty
of selling to members of Congress shares of stock in the
Credit Mobilier of America, for prices much below the
true value of such stock, with intent thereby to influence
the votes and decisions of such members in matters to
be brought before Congress. Resolved, That Mr, Oakes
Ames be, and he is hereby, expelled from his seat as a
member of this House." James Brooks of New York,, the
leader of the Democrats in the House, was also expelled;
he had violated law in using his position as government
director of the Union Pacific to procure stock.

Congress changed its verdict to reprimand, but Ames
and Brooks found little comfort in the lesser disgrace for
both died within the year. None of the others received
official punishment of any kind; neither the members
who admitted purchase of shares but pleaded ignorance
of the implications of large, quick profits on little or no
initial investment like the chairman of that powerful
fiscal agency, the Ways and Means Committee nor
those who like Vice President Colfax embarrassed in
vestigators and country by awkward denial and fantastic
explanation. A Senate committee recommended the ex
pulsion of James W. Patterson, but no action resulted;
five days later the term of the New Hampshire senator
expired.

The press shared Ames' anger that he was offered up
as the "prime sacrifice to appease a public clamor or ex
piate the sins of others." The gist of editorial comment

INTRODUCTION
19

upon the Poland Report was that the briber had been
punished but not the bribe takers and that the investi
gation was

a miserable effort to hunt up a couple of scape goats
to bear the sins of those who were to be saved from
expulsion. The people of the United States feel
deeply the shame and humiliation of the whole af
fair, and they, let us thank Heaven, have not learned
to consider party claims when the national honor is
at stake. They had a right to expect of the Commit
tee either a clear vindication of the accused parties,
or an impartial rigid meting out of justice to them.
The result is appearing. They see their trusted pub
lic servants convicted of falsehood, stained with the
ownership of the most questionable property of the
present day, and they are gravely asked by a Com
mittee of Congress to believe that the men whom
they have trusted and honored, and whom they know
to be keen, shrewd, practical business men, are a
parcel of ignorant fools, unable to manage a simple
investment in stocks with the prudence or care of
the most ordinary man of business.

Gath of the Chicago Tribune went so far as to publish
his belief that Congress was "diseased and corrupt . . .
and has wholly lost its own self-respect and the confi
dence of the country."

The Wilson Committee appointed to examine the re
lationship between the Union Pacific and the Credit
Mobilier partially redeemed the reputation of the House.
Its report was devastating in its analysis of the interlock
ing corporations, its tone harsher and more indignant
than Judge Poland's, its conclusion, echoing Adams' earli
er blast, a refutation of the "patriot" defense attempted
by some of the stockholders:

It is also said that it is unjust to look at this ques
tion in the light of the present; that we should go

INTRODUCTION

20

back to the condition of things before the road was
built, when the whole scheme seemed., to the prudent
capitalists of the country, visionary and perilous.
This is true; and if these gentlemen assumed great
risk from which others shrank, and thereby great
benefits inured to the public, they should have all
due credit. But we think they differed from other
capitalists, not in taking a risk, but in having dis
covered that the road could be built at vast profit
without risk, the resources furnished by the Govern
ment being more than ample for the purpose.

The recommendation of the Wilson Committee that the
Attorney General sue the Union Pacific to recover frau
dulent profits never resulted in the recovery of a penny.
Some of the Congressmen who had been hurt by the
Credit Mobilier but not officially disgraced remained in
Washington. Some, like the fictitious Honest John Vane,
were reflected. (But those who knew called him Wea
thercock Vane.) One even became President of the
United States. Not too many years later the stockholders
of the Union Pacific erected a monument to Oakes Ames
and his brother on the highest ground touched by the
road they helped build. J. W. De Forest had already
done his bit to keep fresh the memory of the Credit
Mobilier.

II

On the first page of his Civil War novel, Miss Rav-
enel's Conversion, De Forest gave his concept of history;
"An obscure American author remarks in one of his re
jected articles . . . that every great historical event rever
berates through the fortunes of private and even secluded
individuals." Only months after the Poland and Wilson
findings, The Atlantic Monthly for July 1873 carried the
first of five consecutive installments telling of the rever-

INTRODUCTION
21

berations of the Credit Mobilier upon De Forest's narra
tive consciousness. His fictitious lobbyist, Darius Dor-
man, had predicted a "one-legged report" from Congress;
Honest John Vane is the novelist's try at a truer version
of what he called the Juggernaut of swindling.

By 1873, he could draw upon experience rich enough
to handle this national subject, Now forty-seven, his first
book, the 500-page History of the Indians of Connecticut,
had appeared twenty-two years earlier and identified a
career-long interest. Its epigraph from Lamentations,
"Our inheritance is turned to strangers, our houses to
aliens," showed his temper; and its contents, sanctioned
by the Connecticut Historical Society, his capacity for
sustained, accurate research at the Yale Library, Hart
ford archives, and the Massachusetts Historical Society.
He did not hesitate to challenge the worth of some of the
manuscripts in the collection of President Stiles for "de
pending too much on the reminiscences of aged men and
women, unaccustomed to making statements for publi
cation, and within whose recollections the slender num
bers of the Indians multiplied as wonderfully as the two
buckram men of Falstaff." His first novel, Witching
Times, serialized in Putnam's in 1856 and 1857, used
Puritan Salem, the setting for one of his short stories
and a ballad; his last novel, A Lovers Revolt (1898),
would recreate colonial Boston and the first battles for
independence. Nor was his historical interest provincial,
for with this mining of American backgrounds he printed
several papers on the history of the Papacy; his Atlantic
essay on "The Cradle of the Human Race" (February
1878 ) received favorable notice in Europe. ( In 1890 he
and Howells exchanged letters over the value of this early
study. ) In addition to finding material in the Revolution,
the Civil War, and Apache skirmishes (Overland, 1871),

INTRODUCTION

22

he wrote a learned, exciting critique of "Caesar's Art of
War and of Writing" (Atlantic, September 1879). De
Forest is one of our first professional military historians.
He was born in Humphreysville, Connecticut, 31
March 1826, into a family proud of its descent from the
de Forests of Avesnes; he would use the Huguenot strain
in Kate Beaumont (1872) and The Bloody Chasm (1881).
Too frail after typhoid to study at nearby Yale in "that
city of geometry and Puritanism," this orphaned son of
a textile manufacturer travelled like Melville and Twain
to the Near East. His Oriental Acquaintance; or, Letters
from Syria (1856), is a young man's record of the journey
from Boston to Smyrna, Jerusalem, and Lebanon. A re
viewer found qualities that are evident in later writings:
brilliance without bombast, liveliness without extrava
gance, and a "tone of thoughtful criticism." (On the
cover the publishers, Dix, Edwards, announced "Herman
Melville's New Book, The Piazza Tales" and Frederick
L. Olmsted's Journey in the Seaboard Slave States.) In
1879, when De Forest was "frozen by neglect" and cer
tain that "our novel-reading public is mainly a female or
a very juvenile public, and wants something nearer its
own mark of intellect and taste, as for instance, 'Helen's
Babies' and That Husband of Mine/" he rewrote this
tour into Irene The Missionary, a tale of American love
in Beirut and Damascus. It was his sardonic hope that
the large public interested in missionaries would believe
that the author was "either a returned missionary, or a
lady."

Like Hawthorne, Howells, and Henry James, he lived
in Europe. "Pursued by the fretting enmity of a mono
tonous invalidism," he shipped to Florence where he met
Horatio Greenough whose sculpture John Vane passed
every day in Washington. Then, after Venice, the water

INTRODUCTION

cure under Priessnitz at Graefenburg. Two months of
incessant hydropathy and chilling aeration improved his
health, and he moved to Paris where he learned to speak
French while arguing politics, and developed an endur
ing enthusiasm for French writers: in turn he praised
Sand, Stendhal, Balzac, Hugo, Taine, Zola. Then, back
to beloved Florence and a life of "supreme laziness."
There were "whole weeks during which ... I scarcely
ever did anything more violent than pull on ... boots
or smoke a hard-drawing cigar." He admired the Cam
panile, the Church of Santa Croce, Bologna's Mercury,
Michelangelo's David, and found even more "sensuous-
ness of enjoyment" in the Arno at night, the hills, the
groves of the Cascine wonders of the wonder-filled
city James and Howells also noted. Always sensitive to
the nuance of language he would record Selnarten
Bowen's "low-downer" talk, John Vane's aberrations, and
Abner Sly's Yankee dialect in A Lovers Revolt he
admired the speech of a girl named Maria from Siena,
"where the language is the purest." One of his friends
read Bulwer, but De Forest spent his hours trying to
turn Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables into
Tuscan, for a Florentine editor had agreed to publish
the translation in the feuilleton of his weekly journal.
But the

choice epithets and metaphysical ideas of the Pyn-
cheon family's history stumbled us to such a degree
that we would only make out about three pages a
day; and after finishing three chapters and part of a
fourth, the work fell through in consequence of my
departure from Florence. In fact it was a little be
yond our capacities, for I was by no means a master
in the graces of Italian composition.

Other legacies of his Italian stay were a thorough
knowledge of Dante, high regard for Manzoni's I Pro-

INTRODUCTION

24

messi Sposi, Guide's Beatrice de Cenci, Carlo Dolci
"in spite of Ruskin" and memory of a moment like
this described in Seacliff ( 1859) :

When I was in Naples, standing in one of the halls
of gigantic Museo Borbonico, I saw an English girl
of about eighteen, staid, quaint, and Jane Eyreish
in aspect, step up to an antique copy of that beauti
ful boy-bust known as the Young Augustus; kiss its
forehead, and then walk quietly away without glanc
ing around her to see whether or not that strange
action had been noticed by the loiterers whose foot
steps echoed down the long galleries.

Years later in a comment to Howells (1879) he gave a
mature reaction to an unrecorded phase of his continental
experience:

What a society that is in Venice and Florence!
You are . . . right in showing up the American lady
who gets on her knees to it. It is quite time we
should protest against the flunkeyism of the colonie
de Paris.

But he waited too long before turning into fiction his
European Acquaintance: Being Sketches of People in
Europe (1858). The Bloody Chasm (1881) with its
Parisian setting, coming after his reading of Daisy Miller
and its succes de haine, as he phrased it, is his weakest
novel.

Home again, he married a girl met at the New Haven
House where he was living like Colburne in Miss
Ravenel's Conversion. Harriet Shephard's father was a
versatile scientist with an international reputation as a
mineralogist and authority on meteorites. An early as
sociate of Benjamin Silliman at Yale and a contributor
to the American Journal of Science and Arts, since 1834
he had been Professor of Chemistry at Charleston ( South
Carolina) Medical College, and since 1845 also Professor

INTRODUCTION
25

of Natural History at Amherst. The De Forests accom
panied Dr. Shephard to Charleston where the novelist
began to observe the "tableau" of society in depth that
he recreated later in one of his major novels, Kate Beau
mont (1872). But onrushing sectional hostility ended
the Southern stay in 1861 when the three made the last
boat north. De Forest's "Charleston Under Arms" in The
Atlantic that April is a valuable report of the South Caro
lina mood just before the assault on Sumter, as well as
a reflection of the author's political sympathy: Buchanan
is a "well-intentioned imbecile" who loves the "chaotic
status quo''; the South Carolineans "see but one side of
the shield, which is quite different as we know, from
the custom of the rest of mankind."

De Forest memorialized his father-in-law as the tender,
unworldly Dr. Ravenel; and he used the scientist's knowl
edge in Overland, where the many pages of remarkable
description of the Southwest owe much of their technical
authenticity to Dr. Shephard and his library. Thurstane,
the officer-hero of this "rattling good yarn," as Brander
Matthews called it, craves "leisure for the study of geol
ogy, mineralogy, and chemistry"; Frank McAlister of
Kate Beaumont has studied earth sciences in Germany
and seeks an American professorship; De Vries of Irene
The Missionary is an ethnologist whose research on the
origins of the Philistines is ended by the Civil War.

Ill

De Forest's reading all these years had the range of
a man who followed his own high intelligence rather than
channels marked by academic hands. He sought knowl
edge in ancient history, political science, economics, and
religion. Within two pages of Honest John Vane he
mentions Niebuhr, Arnold, Grote, Curtius, Mommsen,

INTRODUCTION

26

Adam Smith, Mill, Bastiat, and Henry C. Carey. One of
his short story characters reads Bishop Colenso, the con
troversial exegete of Genesis and Saint Paul. Irene Grant,
the would-be missionary, has spent most of her young
life in her father's library "poring over" Plutarch, Rollin,
and the Classical Dictionary. Overland found space for
Darwin and Spencer; Playing The Mischief ( 1875 ) con
tains an extended and memorable debate on evolution,
with Colonel Murray ( one of his finest creations ) speak
ing for De Forest when he announces, "What with Max
Muller and Whitney, and Dalton and Lecky, and Spencer
and Darwin, and forty more amazing chaps, I am up to
my eyes in new ideas all the while." Galileo, Kepler,
Newton, and Laplace prove to be among the "amazing
chaps" Colonel Murray knows. An elder lawyer in Jus
tine's Lovers ( 1878 ) asks, "Have you read Galton's 'Her
editary Descent of Genius? No? You should read it.
It is a great and terrible revelation. We are the sons of
our fathers, and not of our little resolves." The young
British officer in A Lover's Revolt, worried after the turn
of the first day's fighting at Lexington and Concord,
wants the War Office to send a new general. "If we were
only on good terms with Sparta, and could borrow
Xantippus, Gylippus, or Brasidas!" A Lovers Revolt is
in itself proof of De Forest's study of American and Brit
ish history.

Ruled early, as he confessed,, by the "craze in his head
that he will some day write a great novel," he read wide
ly in fiction, inevitably cataloguing for possible use those
authors who won his admiration, rejecting the many oth
ers. Irving he honored for the creation of Ichabod Crane
and the longer History of New York in Seacliff he
toasted the memory of Wouter Van Twiller but recog
nized limitations in scope. Cooper aroused as little en-

INTRODUCTION

27

thusiasm in De Forest as in Twain. Paulding, Brown,
Kennedy, Simms did nothing for him: "they wrote about
ghosts, and the ghosts have vanished utterly." He found
Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter, Blithedale Romance, and
The House of the Seven Gables "full of acute spiritual
analysis, of the light of the other worlds," but in recoil
ing from complete approval of an artist for whom he
had profound reverence, De Forest revealed that his own
theory of fiction urged other directions. Hawthorne's
novels were

characterized by only a vague consciousness of this
life, and by graspings that catch little but the sub
jective of humanity. . . . Such personages as Haw
thorne creates belong to the wide realm of art rather
than to our nationality. . . . They are what Yankees
might come to be who shut themselves up for life
to meditate in old manses. They have no sympathy
with this eager and laborious people, which takes
so many newspapers, builds so many railroads, does
the most business on a given capital, wages the big
gest war in proportion to its population, believes in
the physically impossible and does some of it. Haw
thorne's characters cannot talk? Certainly not in the
style of this western world; rather in the language
of men who never expressed themselves but on
paper, in dreams.

More than a decade later Henry James also found that
Hawthorne "was not in the least a realist he was not
to my mind enough of one."

But De Forest paid Hawthorne the honor of going to
Salem six years after The Scarlet Letter for the setting
of his first novel. And Witching Times, built upon the
Puritan documents read at the Massachusetts Historical
Society, is an impressive beginning, with its powerful
figure of Henry More struggling to hold back what he

INTRODUCTION

28

calls the witchcraft avalanche. If More is, in his creator's
concept, a New England Quixote who reads his remote
kinsman's Utopia and goes to an undeserved death un-
cowed by obsessed magistrates, his daughter Rachel is
Hester's younger, virginal sister. The tragic Giles Cory,
Justice John Hawthorne, and Cotton Mather whom
the author excoriates all have their place in Witching
Times. Unlike his other novels first serialized in maga
zines, Witching Times was never reprinted in book form.

The native work that came close to his ideal concept
was Uncle Tom's Cabin. De Forest recognized faults in
plot, in a little girl unlike any other little girl, in the
"village twaddle," in an "impeccable Uncle Tom" (see
his handling of Uncle Tom in Miss Rauenel, Kate Beau
mont, and some of the short fiction ) . But he had known
Northerners like those in the book, "and we have seen
such Southerners, no matter what the people south of
Mason and Dixon's line may protest." Its strength lay
in the "picture of American life, drawn with a few strong
and passionate strokes, not filled in thoroughly, but still
a portrait." No other native novel by 1868 when he
made these judgments painted "American life so
broadly, truly and sympathetically"; or offered material
comparable to a Newcomes, a Vanity Fair, a Miserahles,
Little Dorrit, or Trollope's Small House at Allington.
Somehow he missed Moby-Dick. Later (1879) he would
say to Howells, "There is James . . . who belongs to our
school, and who yet seems to be forging ahead." But
by 1887 he wrote him:

I am glad to have found Tolstoi. I had been re
duced, in the matter of novels, to Zola and you; and
two men can't write fast enough for one reader.
There are other good story writers, such as James,
Cable, Craddock. But they are not to me satisfactory

INTRODUCTION
29

and instructing novelists. I now want somebody
from whom I can learn the what and the how. Isn't
it odd the creator of Daisy Miller fails somewhat in
larger painting of human nature?

He warmed to a younger American girl who picked
daisies and violets at the Cascine, Effie Bowen of that
Florentine evocation, Indian Summer.

In almost all of his fiction De Forest is the conscious
humorist. In Honest John Vane he sustains the wit that
begins with the first paragraph, He perpetuates lines
like "the main work of Congress is done out of sight,
like that of a mole," and the description of Olympia Vane
as a "veteran flirt, trained to tough coquetry in many a
desperate skirmish." Of a 93-year-old character in "The
Lauson Tragedy," he wrote "You might travel over him
for a week without discovering half his wonders"; Father
Higgins, a priest who converts cannibals, finds that to
be "worshipped is infinitely more agreeable than being
eaten." In Playing The Mischief, his humorous master
piece, he gives us Hollowbread's "popcorn" way of cos
tuming himself and the affairs of the "bloomer girl,"
Squire Nancy Appleyard. In A Lover's Revolt, the Yan
kee rustic, Abner Sly, and his "pudgy" horse. Admittedly
he knew Dickens and Joe Miller as well as his
comic countrymen: he cites the "impudent" letters of
Jack Downing, the "hyperbolical" Mr. John Phoenix, the
"cacographic quips" of Josh Billings' Allminax, the "im
pudent whimsies" of Artemus Ward, Holmes, and the
"droll" exaggerations of Roughing It by that other com
mentator upon corruption in Washington though How-
ells in 1887 wished that De Forest would understand and
like Twain "better than you do."

His two humorless novels, Justine's Lovers and The
Bloody Chasm, came after the death of his wife and the

INTRODUCTION

30

onset of prolonged illness, a time of despair and subdued
creativity that he tried to rally from by seeking a change
of scene. He asked Howells to secure for him a diplo
matic post from President Hayes, but no embassy or con
sulate opened its doors to the writer who had used Re
publican political folly as a target. Like the invalid, im
poverished Justine whose way of life fate also changed,
he could not read his favorite novels let alone write
with early strength and wit. This is De Forest in 1878:

The Bible was the one and only book which could
occupy me. I wandered through it, and secludedly
dwelt in it, for hours every day. It had become a
novelty, very wonderful and entrancing. In old and
well-known passages I found marvels which I had
never noted before. . . . There was no profound or
peculiar religious experience connected with this
incessant study. ... It was much as if I had met, for
the first time in many years, some beloved guardian
of my childhood,, still as tender and as trusted as
ever. . . . For the profoundly stricken, for the strick
en who cannot lift their hands to struggle, it is a
home of healing and refuge, compared with which
all other asylums are bleak deserts, windblown and
haunted by simoons.

Out of this "perpetual haunting of the Holy Land of the
Scriptures" came a rediscovery of Lamentations and the
Psalms.

Taste and temperament always took De Forest beyond
national boundaries. In the preface to The Downing
Legends (1901), he cautioned that the poems were ex
travaganzas, and that they "will not be liked except by
readers who like such works as the Odyssey, the Arabian
Nights, the Orlando Innamorato of Boiardo and Berai,
the Orlando Furioso of Ariosto,, the Pilgrim's Progress,
Gulliver's Travels, Knickerbocker's History of New York

INTRODUCTION

31

and Hawthorne's Wonder Tales." In "The City of Brass"
he eulogizes the author of The Arabian Nights, that "fer
vid genius to whom we must bow as to one of the un
known gods of literature"; the tales are the favorite read
ings of Bentley Armitage in Kate Beaumont. In Miss
Haveners Conversion he quotes from Cervantes and Bal
zac, and likens Colonel Carter, his hard-drinking, pro
miscuous professional soldier who is one of the powerful
creations of nineteenth-century American fiction, to
Scott's Dugald Dalgetty. A perceptive reviewer called
his Mrs. Larue "a Becky Sharpe with more grace and
tenderness." The literary young hero of Seacliff remem
bers the title-page of Pendennis and Irish novels; the
scientist in Kate Beaumont recites Schiller, and De Vries
of Irene The Missionary, Persian poetry. In several pass
ages De Forest shows his intimacy with Sam Weller and
that other eminent Dickensian, Jefferson Brick of Martin
Chuzzlewit. In Playing The Mischief he speaks of Trol-
lope; one character in The Wetherel Affair ( 1873 ) says,
"Cousin John, you run over with Emerson as I do with
Tupper." His epithet for Senator Ironman is Dundreary,
from the E. H. Sothern role in Our American Cousin, the
play that attracted not only the novelist but, unfortun
ately, President Lincoln. Detailed to duty after the Civil
War in Greenville, South Carolina, he found the place
and time to read Gibbon, Hume, Goldsmith, Addison.
He questioned American neglect of an Italian favorite;
the reason he offered to Howells in 1887 may well ex
plain American neglect of De Forest:

I cannot understand any more than you why I
Promessi Sposi is not held in general enthusiastic
reverence. Perhaps it is because the novel-reading
public is in the main a young or feminine public,
and naturally prefers a work of a lower grade than

INTRODUCTION

32

Manzoni could do. Do you think our novel-reading
public cares much for Hamlet, or Don Quixote, or
any masterpiece ... it appears to me that the ordin
ary or uncultivated mind revolts from anything much
higher than itself. Here is another lofty stair to
climb; here is a new dialect of thought and even of
language to struggle with; here is somebody insult
ing us by speaking a foreign language.

Turgenev also linked Hamlet and Don Quixote.

In each of his twelve novels and in his short fiction,
De Forest at times used his reading, his erudition, rather
than his invention to define character or to create mood,
tone, texture. In Witching Times the Salem landscape
in March is compared to the trees in the Inferno; the
frightful whispers of evil are those Christian heard in
the Pilgrim's Progress, the book he loved for its pure
diction as well as its parable. In Overland he turned to
Prescott and Shenstone's pastorals; to create awe and
horror he loaded a dozen pages with afreets from The
Arabian Nights, Dore's illustrations, Vathek, Milton's hell,
with Bunyan's Dark Valley "the two sublimest landscapes
. . . ever presented to the imagination." Thurstone on a
waterless trek pursued by Apaches is like Christian "lis
tening to the screams and curses of devils." The desper
ate Justine, fallen "from the paradise of brown-stone
fronts and Aubusson carpets," waiting for an interview
with the Secretary who might offer her a Washington
clerkship, thinks of Tennyson's "Sleeping Palace" and of
Muller's Calling of the Condemned to Execution. When
Justine leaves without the job, a friend consoles her, "I
saw you descending those bitter stairs the stairways
that Dante cursed the stairways of the great." The
classical mood at the beginning of Irene The Missionary
is evoked by a scholar who apostrophizes "Those Greeks,

INTRODUCTION
33

those marvellous Greeks" and tells the Iliad episode of
Zeus and the body of his son, Sarpedon. The romance
in Irene almost ends because of conflict between the
"student of the Scriptures" and the student of Balzac.
Poe's "To Annie" closes two deathbed scenes as moving
as those in Dickens or an American favorite, Stowe's The
Pearl of Orr's Island. Painters as different as Michel
angelo, Millais, Greuze, and Fra Angelico ride through
New Mexico; sculpture by Praxiteles and Gerome's nude
Cleopatra ornament Playing The Mischief; Kate Beau
mont reminds her beloved of Murillo's Immaculate Vir
gin.

Seacliff is even more allusive than Overland, for the
narrator, Fitz Hugh, is a writer rather than a soldier and
has at hand Coleridge, Byron, Tennyson, as well as verse
by Alexander Smith, the ubiquitous Bunyan and Cer
vantes, and "that unparalleled narrative of crime and
criminals, the "Memoirs of Vidocq." (De Forest's sub
title is "The Mystery of the Westervelts," and he ends
the book with a murder and a suicide.) A work which
in the judgment of Edward Wagenknecht "represents
about as close an approach to the British country-house
novel as can be made in America," Seacliff has the ad
ditional interest of resembling Gide's Les Faux-Monna-
yeurs for it is a novel told by a novelist at work, with
disquisitions on his craft like this by Fitz Hugh:

Perhaps the embryo Scott is not yet aware that
true portraiture of character, just analysis of hu
man nature, is the gem which lends practical
value to a romance, gives it the power of fact under
the grace of fiction, and places it among those kingly
gifts that the world rejoices to receive. . . . The young
author, no wonder of mind, but still possessed of tal
ents, writes away with a good heart at first; but after
finishing two or three chapters he becomes vaguely

INTRODUCTION

34

conscious that there is some important element of
immortality wanting to his work; and so, merely to
save it from lethargy and early death, he dashes into
rapid movement, passionate situations, and a rhetoric
flavored with gunpowder. His own stores of these
valuables soon giving out, he plagiarizes in his des
peration, stealing one man's hero, another man's mur
der, and a third man's simile.

We are told in Playing The Mischief that Colonel Mur
ray "made one think of a venerable and entirely sane
Don Quixote/' and Hollowbread of "poor Sancho Panza."
Josephine Murray, "wise as a serpent" and one of a sister
hood that includes Mrs. Larue, Olympia Vane, and Mrs.
Chester, impressed by the Parliamentary series, says, "I
have been reading Trollope lately. . . . Mr. Palliser is
so amusing with his labors as Chancellor of the Ex
chequer! Now, who is your Mr. Palliser in Congress?"
John Vane is "that sham Aristides"; newspapermen as
well as Colonel Carter are Dugald Dalgettys; Sykes
Drummond resents the fact that he shares the name of
a Dickens' murderer; in a moment of stress De Forest
has one of his women remember the speech of a heroine
in Bulwer's Pelham. Again and again he turns to Biblical
archetypes of evil not only Satan but Ananias. And
he summarizes a remarkable scene in Kate Beaumont
by writing of the psychotic "social gymnast" who has an
uncontrollable passion for younger men, Mrs. Chester:
"She was a cracked old Cleopatra waiting on a young
rough of an Antony." Though this is one of the least
allusive of De Forest's novels, Frank McAlister worries
over the limitations of American literature, and the author
describes the narrative tensions as those created by the
Montagues and Capulets of South Carolina. One won
ders if Twain remembered the feud of the Beaumonts

INTRODUCTION
35

and the McAlisters when he came to his Shepherdsons
and Grangerfords.

Even lesser works like The Wetherel Affair, Justine s
Lovers, and The Bloody Chasm are rich in literary in
terest, with their turning to Milton, Scott, Cervantes, and
Bunyan: Grace Abounding is that "eloquent confession
of a devout soul, written in simplest, purest, most idio
matic English a book which great literary ability
could not imitate either in feeling or style. ... It equals
Herodotus in childlike grace, and it surpasses him in
sublimity and pathos." (Twain, it will be recalled, has
Huck Finn tell us that he "read considerable in Pilgrims
Progress." He found the "statements was interesting, but
tough." And Don Quixote also sparked Tom Sawyer's
imagination.) John Bowlder, the transcendental philos
opher of The Wetherel Affair, worships Emerson, reads
Whitman, and, carried away by Walden, builds a wood
land hermitage. Like De Forest, Bowlder admits that
his poetry is inferior to Burns' but rationalizes, "what I
have that give I freely, like a bird." Count Poloski, the
suspect foreigner in this Wilkie Collins-like murder mys
tery, claims that he has written a treatise on the "Mi
grations of Metaphor/' and illustrates by calling the Eng
lish language a tangled forest. Poloskfs other favorite
conversation piece is "the world-sorrow" in literature:

We must not laugh at the world-sorrow. . . . You
practical Anglo-Saxons delight to laugh at it; you
call Byron humbug because he felt it and sang it.
But you are wrong. The world-sorrow is a true and
beautiful emotion. . . . The illimitable Shakespeare
divined and described it. The melancholy of Hamlet
comes not altogether from his troubles; it is partly
world-sorrow. When we behold that great drama
from this one of its many sides, we see that Hamlet
was in part a prophecy of Rousseau and Byron.

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36

A third character in The Wetherel Affair, Walter Leh-
ming, is a professional journalist who bemoans the poor
taste of editors and readers of weeklies who avoid Dick
ens, Hawthorne, Trollope, and Charles Reade. He as
sures a young woman, in a judgment that adheres to
De Forest's own work,

You may trust Reade. ... He will always give
you a well-ordered plot and an interesting sequence
of incidents. Some of his characters, too, are sketch
ed vigorously, and have the broad traits of human
nature recognizable everywhere.

Lehming's comment on style, made at the time of the
composition of Honest John Vane, shows De Forest's ap
proach to rhetoric: the journalist praises the "natural"
figure of a pumpkin pie, for it is "drawn from common
life, like the similes of Socrates and Emerson." Lehmmg's
analysis of the difficulty met by American writers is as
valuable as his talk of books. In his strong image, native
artists are being ruined by competition from all the ath
letes of foreign literature an argument De Forest re
peated as the years continued to deprive him of repu
tation.

Justine's only talent is the writing of hymns. Encour
aged by one of her "lovers" to follow Watts and Keble,
she turns Biblical stories into ballads, "wondering inno
cently the while that Macaulay should not have written
them" rather than the "Lays of Ancient Rome." Virginia
Beaufort in The Bloody Chasm, which the war dug be
tween North and the remnants of the South, moves from
ruined Charleston to Paris, "that city of splendors and
delights." She reads French history, longs for "a great
poet of the Southland to mourn suitably for our dead,"
and enjoys "learned music Wagner's stuff and that
sort of thing." Her disguised husband De Forest has

INTRODUCTION
37

removed the false whiskers donned in a darkened church
ceremony talks of aesthetics while at the Luxembourg,
and observes that "art doesn't spring up in thinly settled
agricultural districts. It needs cities."

IV

Commissioned as a captain in Company I of the
Twelfth Connecticut Volunteers, The Charter Oak Regi
ment, De Forest steeped himself in the Civil War:

Counting service in war and in peace, I was six
and a half years under the colors. I was in three
storming parties, six days of field engagement, and
thirty-seven days of siege duty, making forty-six days
under fire.

My chief regret with regard to this matter is that
I could not take part in one of the greater battles,
such as Gettysburg or Chickamauga. I am not only
glad, but I am sincerely thankful that I did not miss
Port Hudson and the final victories in the Shenan-
doah Valley. In the finishing fight there I was on
the staff of General Emory, carrying various orders
for him and one for General Sheridan.

These years he told in letters home, with revelation of
life on military transports, drunkenness in camp (A
Lovers Revolt includes strong scenes of the troops of
General Gage swilling four-penny quarts of New Eng
land rum), the haphazard commissary, initial exposure
to fire and death at Georgia Landing and the assaults
on Port Hudson where he was wounded. Retold in his
later assignment to write Nineteenth Corps history, at
last they merged into Miss RaveneTs Conversion. The
war-spared Howells returned again and again to this
novel, discovering that "it does not shrink even when put
by the side of Tolstoi's War and Peace." For De Forest

INTRODUCTION

38

was one of the first to avoid what he called the false,
"the poetical view of battle. (If you want to know how
a hero feels in the trenches get behind a tree not quite
big enough to cover you.)" He chose to catalog items
like the terror of Port Hudson, surgery in the field hos
pitals, the waking of Carter's brigade at Cane River, the
constant wish for promotion, the passing of time by the
brave with free whiskey and easy women. But he lived
to see greater popularity than his country ever gave him
bestowed upon the war novel of a boy not yet born
when he was feverish and hungry in Louisiana and Vir
ginia. He also lived to read "The Open Boat" and know
how superbly Crane handled a shipwreck like that at
the start of Kate Beaumont.

It is not only in the campaigns of Miss RaveneTs Con
version and the cavalry operations and night skirmishes
of Overland that De Forest shows his stature as a war
novelist. The first readers of the manuscript of A Lover's
Revolt ranked it with The Spij and S. Weir Mitchell's
Hugh Wynne, for A Lovers Revolt recreates with au
thority the "first battle-day of the American Revolution";
we have no better treatment of Lexington and the as
sault on Bunker Hill. It gives the "little touches" he ad
mired in Tolstoi a cherry-cheeked boy and his father

as well as the technical details: the strategic plan of
battle and the tactical ebb and flow; a careful exposition
of terrain, tables of organization, drill systems, maneu
vers, uniforms, weapons, ammunition, staff organization

even the books and "spoken English" of the colonial
troops. When Howells introduced him to the Russian,
he recognized at once with his veteran's memory the
scope of the epic writer:

You do right to praise Tolstoi. Something that you
wrote a while ago sent me to Peace and War. . . .

INTRODUCTION
39

Let me tell you that nobody but he has written the
whole truth about war and battle. I tried, and I told
all I dared, and perhaps all I could. But there was
one thing I did not dare tell, lest the world should
infer that I was naturally a coward, and so could not
know the feelings of a brave man. I actually did not
dare state the extreme horror of battle, and the
anguish with which the bravest soldiers struggle
through it. His story of Borodino the soldiers sit
ting hungry and white under the storm of death; the
desperate struggles to keep away from the horrors
of the situation; the poor brave Prince pacing the
meadow, counting his steps ... it is the actual truth
about the glories of war. I say it on the faith of a
man who has seen it all a great many times by the
hour together. . . . Oddly enough, the truth is not
true to the uninformed. I recommended Tolstoi's
Borodino to an educated, bright man. . . . He re
turned it with the remark that it seemed 'confused/
Well, that is just the truth, the super-eminent, vital
fact of the description. Nothing is more confound
ing, fragmentary, incomprehensible than a battle as
one sees it. And you see so little, too, unless you are
a staff officer and ride about, or perhaps a general.
No two spectators ever fully agree in their story of a
battle. Tolstoi must have been engaged many times.
There are a thousand little touches which nobody
could have guessed . . . touches which go to make
up the picture of the haste, flurry, confusion, which
a battle is. I am glad to have found Tolstoi.

After Miss RaveneTs Conversion his productivity, if
not his popularity, gathered momentum as the 1860's
ended. The name of De Forest over serialized novels,
short stories, essays, and poetry appeared often in Harp-
ers, Galaxy, and thanks to Howells 7 (September 1868)
invitation to send manuscripts, in The Atlantic; thirty
years later Howells continued to place De Forest with
publishers. The New Haven man competed for space

INTRODUCTION

40

and readers with famous English writers like Thackeray,
Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Trollope, and emerging Ameri
cans like Henry James and Mark Twain. The technical
demands and restrictions of magazine publication per
turbed him as they sometimes did Dickens. To overcome
the forced patterning into brief scenes of equal length,
a common structural fault of the period, according to
Alexander Cowie, he thought "the number had better be
long than short," but obedient to Howells' editorial de
mands he shortened the last installments of Kate Beau
mont. Later when he received proofs of another novel,
he complained that the printers had "rammed" his narra
tive and dialogue into solid columns. "An author's para
graphing is part of his style; and mine is meant to help
the reader understand and take notice." An extant letter
to Donald Grant Mitchell (1870) shows his response to
editorial finicality:

I think that I have removed all the rocks of of
fence; if not, please give them a hasty dig yourself,
showing no tenderness. I have cut out, as far as may
be without destroying sense, all such words as slav
ery, freedom and other banner words; and I have
softened or removed allusions to local peculiarities.
Moreover, I have interpolated the accompanying
passages. You see that they represent the objects of
my fun (if it be fun) as eccentrics, odd fish, and not
representatives of the classes to which they belong.
It seems to me that this ought to obviate the rancor
of both radical and silver-grey,

Out of his knowledge of the South before Sumter and
two years' experience as an administrator in South Caro
lina for the Bureau of Frecdmcn and Refugees came
short fiction like that real foreshadowing of Caldwcll and
Faulkner, "An Independent KuKlux," with Selnarten
Bowen, his quid-chewing wife, and the Negro Ham, who,

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41

like Major Scott in Miss RaveneFs Conversion, is "much
in the habit of matrimony." "Drawing Bureau Rations"
is one of his episodes of social fragmentation everywhere
evident in his wide, war-ravished area. The major ac
complishment of years among the poor-white 'low-down
ers" and an earlier, unbroken Southern society is Kate
Beaumont, according to his most appreciative early critic,
Clarence Gordon in 1873, "the most prominent, the most
popular, and probably the best of Mr. De Forest's works."
Those who want evidence of pioneer realism should read
the chapters composed long before Howells' Bartley
Hubbard went on his polite, hot-scotch spree, that take
Randolph Armitage, "one of those knight-errants who
are created by the accolade of a bottle," to the cracker
ball, and blind drunk on raw corn, back to his wife:

"I wonder at you," said Kate once. "I never imagined
that a woman could have such fortitude."

"Fortitude!" returned Nellie. "I am intelligent enough
to know that it is not fortitude that you mean. It is mere
hardened callousness and want of feeling. I ceased some
time ago to be a woman. I am a species of brute."

But fame continued to elude De Forest even with fre
quent publication. He told Howells in 1871,

I was almost discouraged the other day by a leader
in the Tribune on "American Novels" which said that
De Forest is doing good work "almost unnoticed."
I see few papers, but I fear the man is right. If you
think so, let me know and I will try to put in more
stimulus, or, that failing, to be much briefer. Per
haps, however, the coming volume publication of
Overland will help. In this country advertisement
and trumpeting are as potent as around Jericho.

Howells in an 1872 "Recent Literature" column that also
treated The Hoosier Schoolmaster, told his readers that

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42

with Miss Ravenel's Conversion and Overland, Kate
Beaumont "forms to our minds, strong proof that we are
not so much lacking in an American novelist as in a pub
lic to recognize him." But that year Lippincott printed
Not Pretty, But Precious, a collection of short fiction by
"John Hay, Clara F. Guernsey, Margaret Hosmer, Har
riet Prescott Spofford, Lucy Hamilton Hooper, Etc." De
Forest had not yet achieved equal billing with the four
ladies; he is the "Etc." on the title page.

V

It is revealing that when De Forest in 1868 wrote a
study of the American novel, with Uncle Tom's Cabin
he cited Little Dorrit rather than any other work by
Dickens. Like Shaw he sensed its power to reform.
Later he could not read enough of Zola. Like Dickens,
Stowe,. and Charles Reade with whom Howells and oth
ers compared him The Nation in 1874 called De For
est an American Charles Reade beginning with Witch
ing Times he had built his fiction on a cause. He had
ended this rendering of a society nearly destroyed by
total magisterial tyranny a primitive 1984 or Darkness
at Noon with a charge:

Let all future Cotton Mathers learn charity from
his unintentional sins, and the mortifying inevitable
manner in which they found him out. For,, if there
is any lesson to be drawn from this book, it is, that
even in such a trinity as faith, hope, and charity, the
greatest and most beautiful thing of all is charity.

In Miss RaveneTs Conversion he had exposed the specu
lators, the financial camp followers who made deals with
Colonel Carter for cotton and government riverboats;
Ben Butler's application of Washington politics to New

INTRODUCTION

43

Orleans, damaging to the Union troops and helpful to
enemy civilians; the promotions like Gazaway's through
political pressure when Carter wanted the coward dis
graced and gibbeted. ( De Forest himself ended his mili
tary career as a brevet-major slow advance for so
long a tour of duty. ) A large part of the narrative scheme
of Kate Beaumont contains the progress of a congression
al campaign in South Carolina complete with partisans
and "wire-pullers."

In "The Colored Member," a story printed in Galaxy,
March 1872, he came to the railroad lobbyist and the
fraudulent promoter. Daddy Abel, who looks like a tur
key buzzard, announces the theme when he tells Jack
Hunt, the carpetbagger lobbyist, "the/s heaps o' money
in this railroading business o' yourn." Pompey, the col
ored member of a Southern legislature, gets drunk on
free liquor, tells off the lobbyist and suffers the conse
quence of his patriotic indiscretion. His seat is promptly
contested, taken from him, and he is returned to private
life in Alligatorville, to his 'possums and sweet potatoes.
In December 1872 The Atlantic ran "An Inspired Lob
byist," with settings familiar to John Vane: the town of
Slowburg (he added an "h" in the novel) in "a little
state, which may have been Rhode Island,, or may have
been Connecticut"; and two Washington command posts:
the bar of the Arlington Hotel and the committee rooms
of the Capitol. The inspired lobbyist, Ananias Pullwool,
succeeds in making the citizens of Fastburg hire him to
lobby their town into becoming the sole capital of the
little state, rather than continue sharing honors with
Slowburg. After Pullwool pockets Fastburg money he
moves to its rival and raises money there to halt Fast-
burg's plan. The result for the duped towns is a stale
mate; Pullwool is the only winner.

INTRODUCTION

44

The Credit Mobilier was too massive a fraud to crowd
into a short story. Though the genre of the political novel
had only been touched by the early 1870's, De Forest
attempted in Honest John Vane to go beyond the partial
treatment of his early fiction and write a total political
novel. For the first time his major character would be
a politician active in Washington. There were few Amer
ican guides: Brackenridge's Modern Chivalnj had re
mained isolated for half a century; then with the pulse
of realism quickening, the Brook Farmer G. W. Curtis
in Trumps (1861), turned his reforming zeal to corporate
influence on legislation and legislators. A New York
journalist, Henry Morford, in 1863 and 1864 wrote three
novels of the corruption spread by army contractors with
their paper shoes and rotten meat. In England, Disraeli
had added Lothair (1870) to the three political novels
with which he pioneered in the 1840's. More important
for De Forest than the existence in literature of a char
acter like the Etonian aristocrat Coningsby, to the genre
came Trollope with his political aspirations, months as an
observer in the galleries of the House of Commons, cam
paign experience, and anger over evidence of degrada
tion among the electorate. The American read carefully
the six Parliamentary novels beginning with Can You
Forgive Her (1864), where we meet the great Liberal,
Plantagenet Palliser, and the publican Mr. Grimes, who
equates votes with hard cash. Phineas Finn (1869), like
the Slowburgh aspirant, is helped to victory by the in
volvement of a rival in bribery. The satirical Eustace
Diamonds (1873), serialized earlier in the same issues
of Galaxy with De Forest material, contains in the wick
ed Lady Eustace a woman whose way of life Olympia
Vane and Josephine Murray understand. Honest John
Vane, Playing The Mischief, and Justine's Lovers may

INTRODUCTION

45

be considered De Forest's attempt to parallel Trollope
and write an American Congressional series.

He continued to use national political subjects to the
very end of his career. A Lovers Revolt with its ideolo
gical conflict between Rebel and Tory, ends with the
triumph of the former seen as a portent: A family loyal
to the King "were so busy with the poor old Tory body
of death that they missed seeing Major Asahel Farnlee
ride past ... his black eyes sparkling and his dark aqui
line face flushed with triumph, an incarnation of the
coming republic." The Downing Legends., at the start
of the new century, are of American "manifest destiny"
in a "whimsical guise." Medley and Palestina (1902)
contains the ballad of a logrolling Congressman, "Judge
Boodle."

De Forest was by no means the one native novelist
of his generation to become absorbed in a new subject,
Twain's full-length study of contemporary history is the
irreverent Gilded Age. Henry Adams' anonymous Demo
cracy (1880) ran through sixteen editions, readers pre
ferring his Mrs. Lightfoot Lee to Mrs. Vane and Mrs.
Murray. Albion Tourgee also used the Credit Mobilier.
Hamlin Garland, Marion Crawford, Frank Norris, Win
ston Churchill, David Graham Phillips in turn at his
New Haven hotel the long-lived De Forest (he died 6
June 1906) watched the authors of successors to his
Honest John Vane and Playing The Mischief succumb
as he had to the excitement of attempting to master a
fictional form and subject described by an English prac
titioner, Mrs. Humphry Ward, as most difficult of all but
also the most tempting to the mature artist. De Forest
would have welcomed Of Thee I Sing and The Last
Hurrah.

INTRODUCTION

46

VI

"Did Mr. De Forest/' asked The Nation, "refresh his
memory of Swift before writing the adventures of John
Vane?" Though he knew his Gulliver ("Brobdingnagian*
is his epithet as far back as Witching Times), he testified
here as he did in Playing The Mischief where he called
the United States "this great model republic of Vanity
Fair/' that Bunyan rather than Swift served as his mentor
in allegory as the Puritan had served Hawthorne. Des
cribing in his twenty-third chapter the widening web of
guilt spun by the vindictive testimony of Simon Sharp,
he wrote, "It was a new and perversely reversed and al
together bedevilled rendering of the Pilgrims Progress
into American politics; it was much as if Bunyan had at
last pitched his Christian and Hopeful into the little
buried hole which led from the gate of Zion to the Pit."

Without forcing the novel into a false, rigid analogy,
it is possible to follow John Vane to his "reversed" goal.
He journeys not to the holy city of Zion, but to Destruc
tion, with profitable excursions to the Valley of Ease
where the silver mines are accessible. Like Pliable he is
converted by Darius Dorman, who is De Forest's version
of the "foul fiend" Apollyon. Vane listens all the woeful
way to the false Evangelists, to Simon Sharp, to Senator
Ironman, that Beelzebub who in flesh may have been
Zachariah Chandler of Michigan whose H Street house
mounted many parties like the one Olympia longed to
attend though she had but the garnet gown. Or Ros-
coe Conkling, the foppish Senator from New York, may
have sat for Ironman. It was Conkling who fathered the
strategy described in Honest John Vane of a suspect
legislator introducing a resolution of inquiry into cor
ruption which involved himself, and then dominating the

INTRODUCTION
47

appointments to the investigating committee. A news
paper from Conkling's home state dared print without
fear of a libel suit the charge that his great wealth had
all accrued after he reached Washington. Nor is Olympia
Vane to travel like Christiana; she is fated to remain the
daughter Adam called Pride of Life.

De Forest's retention of Bunyan's prototypes for his
allegory, and his reversal of Christian's direction from
good to evil prevented the novel from having either hero
or heroine. With few minor exceptions the author is in
stantly hostile to all of his characters, revealing his scorn
ful bias through slanted editorial statement, rather than
risking ambiguity by definition in dramatic scene or
through narrative reflection. His voice, always heard
guiding the reader's sensibilities and forming his loyal
ties, is as overt as a cartoonist's his contemporary Nast
who was blackening similar subjects, or Matt Morgan of
Leslies or Darley, whose plates De Forest used in the
History of the Indians of Connecticut. From the begin
ning, indeed with the ironic symbol and pun of the title
he had also punned in Miss Ravenel with Larue when
he meant La rou6e he prepares the reader for Vane's
ultimate foundering in the Washington slough. The
Slowburgh citizen possessed a good name, but De Forest
tells us that it was bought cheaply and used vainly. At
first glance a man of stature, he is soon denigrated phys
ically by jibes that he "ran a little too much to blubber
for comfort" and that he was "slightly vacuous in ex
pression." Lest doubt remain as to his opinion of the
Congressman, De Forest summarizes him as a man who
"had no moral or intellectual significance. . . . He did
not prize virtue for its own sake but because the name
of it had brought him honor." Lack of character and

INTRODUCTION

ideals negates the evolutionary process and produces a
leader manque.

The author's handling of handsome Olympia Vane
makes her something less than endearing. She had been
"polished by long-continued friction against undergradu
ate pundits." (In Seacliff, where he tells of a college
junior who is a lifelong sophomore, in Miss RaveneTs
Conversion, with its town and gown touches, in Honest
John Vane, and in Irene The Missionary, De Forest pio
neers the use of the campus in fiction. ) She knows what
it is to stay up after midnight unchaperoned and to be
engaged often, for she is in danger of becoming like the
belle who "hung on to the students till she was well into
the thirties," Miss Minnie Biffles of Irene The Missionary,
"a college widow that's what we used to call them."
Her mother, "industrially and morally," is "worth six" of
Olympia. Mrs. Smiles, the hard-pressed boarding-house
hostess who "had come out at the little end of the horn
of plenty," is the one woman De Forest touches with re
spect; his tribute to her comes out of his travel memories
for she reminds him of weathered Italian statuary. The
younger sister gets little traditional sentiment. She ap
pears briefly and is removed quickly, not by tearful death
as in the novels of Augusta Evans Wilson or Susan Warn
er but by watchful Olympia, who recognizes a possible
rival for favor in the "china-ware blue eyes" of the erst
while manufacturer of refrigerators and takes prompt
remedial action.

In Miss RaveneTs Conversion DC Forest deliberately
turned away from the Charles O'Mallcy type of military
character; in Honest John Vane he avoided any similarity
to a recent success like Faith in Gates Ajar, with twenty
printings in one year, or Gertrude of The Lamplighter,
with hundreds of thousands of American and English

INTRODUCTION

49

buyers. Nor does John ever see his Olympia as Don
Quixote saw Dulcinea, the beautiful figment in the book
De Forest read as lovingly and as frequently as the Pil
grims Progress and The Arabian Nights. Olympia is a
fleshly reality who will not tolerate a time of two small
rooms and travel by horse-cars with a husband who rates
only minor committee assignments. "Is it possible," he
asked himself, "that she is not going to be satisfied with
succeeding through my success but means to make her
own glory the centre of our life?" Olympia becomes
"sore and prickly with a consciousness of her husband's
incapacity," and John, who might have followed the ad
vice and example of the idealist-reformer, the "revenue
tariff" crusader Cavendish, to remain honest though it
meant a life of "tough steak and cold hominy of cheap
boarding houses," sells a reputation worth more than its
original one hundred dollars to his Mephistopheles not
to possess Marguerite but to silence her.

We also see the Vanes from another perspective, that
of Playing The Mischief where they reappear, for De
Forest, like Trollope with Palliser and Lady Glencora,
carried some of his characters into later books. The sec
ond meeting confirms the first. The Congressman is now
a well-known ten percenter, all show of dedicated states
manship long fled from his fatted conscience. He can
afford to dine at John Welcker's walnut-panelled restau
rant, with its framed letter from Charles Dickens prais
ing the superlative cuisine. His companions are veterans
of the Credit Mobilier who plan other raids; in fact the
Great Subfluvial and the Sub-Tunnel, corporate names
De Forest used for legal and artistic reasons rather than
their archetypes, the Union Pacific and the Credit Mobi
lier, are both composites of two actual wildcat schemes
of the day: a drainage tunnel under the Comstock Lode

INTRODUCTION

50

and a plan to save "the alluvial" running into the Gulf
of Mexico. The "semi-vulgar" Olympia is a fixture at
Senator Ironman's parties, the elegant target of new
favor seekers. Physically she remains a "lovely woman"
but her character is "of the greedy, extravagant, envious,
spiteful sort."

With Darius Dorman, De Forest risked violating the
advice of his own young author in Seacliff: "Poor novel
ists and playwrights are perpetually caricaturing real life,
with a faith in human stupidity which pays us no com
pliment." And some of his readers, including Howells
and James, called him for forcing the concept. He had
first sketched Dorman in a short story with the obvious
name of Professor Heller. Now he modelled his embel
lished satanic iconography not only after Bunyan's Apol-
lyon, but the personification of evil by other titans: Mil
ton and Goethe. One reviewer sensed a turning to Haw
thorne. Indeed Goodman Brown had walked in the forest
with the sooty Dorman, though he knew him as "the
traveller with the twisted staff."

Job Poor (Pennsylvania's "Pig Iron" Kelley of high-
tariff notoriety?), "such fellows as Christian and Faithful
in the Senate . . . Greatheart and Hopeful in the House"
are all Dormant creatures,, fit representatives of an elec
torate that cannot vote for a Bummer because he violated
the "cardinal eleventh commandment, Thou shalt not be
found out"; and will not vote for a Saltonstall because
he is "too much of a gentleman." They settle for a John
Vane. De Forest's scorn for all of this is Carlylean, his
irritation as obvious as that other experienced Washing
ton observer, Whitman of Democratic Vistas, who was
insisting that the obvious ills of American society must
undergo sharp diagnosis.

INTRODUCTION
51

"As long as these subsidy bills and relief bills are al
lowed/' observes Greatheart, "no man ought to run for
Congress who is not a Croesus or a Cato." But the candi
date from Slowburgh is neither rich nor wise.

In terms of popular fiction ground out by the Mrs.
Wilson, Southworth, Phelps, Warner, and the star of
De Forest's former publishers, Annie Edwardes, whose
seven novels Sheldon & Co. blurbed as ranking with
George Eliot's soon to be joined by E. P. Roe who
proved that sentiment and piety profited a male novelist
more than satire and the muck-rake De Forest could
have been accused of writing an anti-novel. He offered
the common reader little: no hero, no heroine, only vil
lains and villainy on a national scale and the disturbing
sound of a reformer lecturing to the heedless. No ro
mance for the patrons of American Mudie's Select Li
brary, but "an entire absence of sentimentality," gross
men, gratuitous insults to contemporary women. He pre
ferred those of older times, "when ladies were not mere
dandies," but "like their men, were producers as well as
consumers." (This disdain revealed itself in The Weth-
erel Affair where Alice Dinneford like "many another
'sweet girl' of our times . . . had grown up in the belief
that life ought to be one everlasting picnic, at least for
young ladies.") For his efforts he got as little support
as Horace Greeley, who like John Vane and Twain's
Senator Dilworthy, also fought the franking privilege in
the pathetic campaign of 1872. The American public
was as unready for De Forest's concept of the political
novel, told with his "twin honesties, moral and mental,"
as Clarence Gordon named them, as it was for reform
presidents. He scoffed at Jacob Abbott's "instructive
juveniles," but they sold in the millions. Richmond &

INTRODUCTION

52

Patten's one edition of Honest John Vane has sufficed
all these years.

Earlier magazine publication of the novel linking him
to The Atlantic school lessened the likelihood of reviews
in other periodicals; the first extensive review did not
help sales. In all of his fiction he sought to avoid writing
like the amateur litterateur he described in Kate Beau
mont: "a kind of poetical prose, much admired by some
of the women to whom he read it." He hated language
"worn threadbare" and showing "all the seams and
creases." Nor did he treat tolerantly his characters who
talked "in what Blair calls 'full periods/" When he
classed Caesar's Commentaries as the best of all military
narratives, he spoke of "its extreme simplicity and natur
alness of manner." Caesar never "struts" and has an
"apparent scorn of mere diction"; no prose could be less
given to "points and artifices of rhetoric." Dr. Ravenel
uses the verb "tote" because it has "a monosyllabic vigor
about it which pleads for it." The writing in Honest
John Vane is, then, purposely understated, dead-pan,
until enlivened by gusts of sardonic wit as startling as
the extended figure of the now-venal Congressman rolled
over like a crab and submerged by the flood of lobby-
created corruption. De Forest included editorial-like
paragraphs such as those on the members of the "spiritual
mobocracy," and frequent gags or "hits/' like "He learned,
or supposed he had learned, that many Congressmen
kept Uncle Sam's eagle setting on their own financial
eggs." Or "Darius smiled, as a slave-trader might smile
upon a stalwart, unsuspicious negro who should express
a curiosity to see the interior of his schooner." He used
the unexpected, ironic epithet: "It cost him seconds of
penal meditation"; and phrases like "thimbleful of soul."
It can be said of De Forest in Honest John Vane what

INTRODUCTION
53

he wrote of Bentley Armitage in Kate Beaumont: "one
side of his face all seriousness, and the other full of
satire."

But now he was found "decidedly turbid" and guilty
of "loose writing and coarse imagery/ 7 Henry James in
The Nation for 31 December 1874, granted that "the
portrait of one of our . . . usual legislators . . . has a
great deal of force," but concluded with this assault:

Whether accidentally or intentionally we hardly
know, "Honest John Vane" exhales a penetrating
aroma of what in plain English one must call vul
garity. Every note the author strikes reverberates
with a peculiarly vulgar tone; vulgarity pervades the
suggestions, the atmosphere of his volume. This re
sult has doubtless been in a great measure designed;
he has wished to overwhelm the reader with the evil
odor of lobbyism. But the reader, duly overwhelm
ed, and laying down the volume with a sense of hav
ing been in irredeemably low company, may be ex
cused for wondering whether, if this were a logical
symbol of American civilization, it would not be well
to let that phenomenon be submerged in the tide of
corruption.

Howells, already on record in the belief that De Forest
"is really the only American novelist" (1874), came to
his side in The Atlantic for February 1875 an issue
that carried parts of Roderick Hudson and Old Times
on the Mississippi:

You have but to change names and dates a very
little, and you have the Congressional Washington
of 1874-1875 as clearly portrayed in the book as that
of 1871-1872. In this country, at least, there has
never been so good a political satire as this; but its
excellence as a political satire is only one of the many
excellencies in it. The principal persons, John Vane
and his wife, are presented with the sharpness and

INTRODUCTION

54

depth of delineation which one finds in all of Mr.
De Forest's best work,, and which is peculiar to him.

Olympia Vane brought special praise from the editor:

She is to be added to that line of women in the
painting of whom Mr. De Forest never weak in
the presentation of character would be recognized
by a more discerning public than ours, as having
shown the skill and force of a master. Whether they
are pleasant people or not is quite beside the pur
pose. One feels them to be true, and that is enough.

Howells' tribute culminated years later in A Modern
Instance. Had Olympia Vane travelled from Washing
ton to Equity, Maine and by then her husband's wages
allowed a special car she would have been at home
with Marcia Gaylord. In the letter that De Forest con
sidered "the soundest praise I ever had," Howells in 1886
wrote him:

I ought to tell you that it was your bold grappling
with the fact of the robust lovemaking among three-
fourths of our nation that gave me courage to deal
with it in Lemuel, and a Modern Instance. It's odd
that no one touched it before you. But our life, as
it differs from that of other nations, is as yet almost
wholly untouched in our fiction. You I consider our
earliest novelist.

Other strengths of Honest John Vane could have been
noted. Thackerayan intrusions sometimes damage the
tone of earlier books. Here they are reduced or masked
with selective skill. The plot avoids cumbrous episodes,
fashionable sub-plots and inserts, the contrived, install
ment-ending suspense that mars Overland, or the re
course to coincidence of Mm RaveneTs Conversion. It
has a direct, inevitable flow that is like a simple,, clari
fied abstract of the voluminous testimony given to the

INTRODUCTION
55

Forty-Second Congress. And yet individual sections
emerge: Dorman's analysis of the repudiation of Salton-
stall by the party hacks: "You can't get people to hurrah
for a gravestone, even if it has a fine name on it"; the
night of the caucus and the itemizing of Vane's plat
form; the summary of post-war political economy; Con
gressman Simon Sharp's exposition of "usefulness" and
"special legislation"; the discussion of the lobby-corrupt
ed legislators after Vane utters his first words of sin,
"Darius, I am awfully hard up"; the study of that "partial
ly respectable statesman and almost entirely ludicrous
man," Senator Ironman; the quick descent of Vane after
his discovery, as painful an epiphany as Goodman
Brown's sight of Faith's pink ribbon, that "the other re
spected temples of righteousness, were nothing but
whited sepulchres, full of railroad bonds and all unclean-
ness"; and the transformation of the hesitant sinner into
a predatory conniver:

"I don't see how I came to make this blunder,"
he chattered, arching his eyebrows as apologetical
monkeys do. [Dorman had withheld a dividend.]

"You don't pronounce it right; it wasn't a blunder,
but plunder," smiled Vane, with a satirical severity,
suggestive of Satan rebuking Sin.

Even James liked the narrative strategy that guided Vane
through the confrontation by the investigators and in
spired his escape. "Mr. De Forest did well not to sacri
fice to the vulgar need for a denouement, but to leave
his hero's subsequent career to the irritated conscience
of the reader."

The most flagrant error of reviewers was to miss De
Forest's affirmation that the "vast, industrious decent
American public, which wire-pullers usually regard as

INTRODUCTION

56

having no more intelligence or more principle than one
of the forces of nature, showed unmistakably that it pos
sessed much political virtue and some political sense."
Nor could his contemporaries appreciate his prophetic
concern over the longevity of the lobby. At the end of
Honest John Vane De Forest disposed of his Satan, his
Darius Dorman, "who vanished and was not seen." But
news out of Washington the many years since the Credit
Mobilier tells us of Dorman's occasional return. Until
he is gone forever, Honest John Vane deserves a reading.

JOSEPH JAY RUBIN

THE PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY

SOURCES

ACKNO WLEDGMENTS

Gordon S. Haight has done for De Forest in this cen
tury what Howells tried earlier: reprint a major novel
and proclaim its author's underrated work in introduc
tions to Miss Ravenel's Conversion ( 1939 and 1955 ) and
his chapter "Realism Defined" in the Literary History of
the United States. James H. Croushore's valuable edi
tions of A Volunteers Adventures (New Haven, 1946)
and A Union Officer in the Reconstruction ( New Haven,
1948), contain introductions by Stanley T. Williams and
David M. Potter; both volumes testify to the depth of
De Forest's experience. Three historians: Arthur H.
Quinn, American Fiction (New York, 1936), Alexander
Cowie, The Rise of the American Novel (New York,
1951), and Edward Wagenknecht, Cavalcade of the
American Novel (New York, 1952), have amplified the
judgment of Howells recorded in 1895:

I have long thought it more discreditable to our
taste than to his talent that he has not been recog
nized as one of our foremost novelists, for his keen
and accurate touch in character, his wide scope, and
his unerring rendition of whatever he has attempted
to report of American life.

The official source of information about the Credit
Mobilier is the Reports of Committees of the House of
Representatives for the Third Session of the Forty-Sec-

and Congress (Washington, 1873). George A. Town-
send, Washington Outside and Inside (Hartford, 1874);
Henry K. White, History of the Union Pacific Railway
(Chicago, 1895); Nelson Trottman, History of the Union
Pacific (New York, 1923); and Fletcher M. Green, "Ori
gins of the Credit Mobilier of America," Mississippi
Valley Historical Review (September 1959), 238-251,
add to the sorry revelations.

I wish to thank Yale University Library for permission
to examine and reprint from its extensive collection of
De Forest letters, manuscripts, and books; and Harvard
University Library for copies of letters to Howells. The
quotations from the letters of Howells to De Forest are
printed with the permission of the heirs of William Dean
Howells; further use may not be made by others without
express permission. The Pennsylvania State University
provided a research grant, and its Fred Lewis Pattee Li
brary offered facilities and materials. Three of my col
leagues, Ira V. Brown, Arthur O. Lewis, and Hadly R.
Waters, read sections of the manuscript and offered sug
gestions.

Finally, it is a pleasant duty to record gratitude to
Harrison T. Meserole for his many hours of editorial help.

TEXT

With the exception of silent changes made for the sake
of standardizing spelling, capitalization, punctuation, and
correcting obvious misprints or an auctorial slip like
the writing of Jabez for Simon the text of Honest
John Vane reproduced here is that of the only book
edition, published in 1875 by Richmond & Patten, New
Haven. Since its first appearance in five installments of
The Atlantic Monthly from July through November 1873,
De Forest had made approximately fifty minor changes
in the text of the novel. He added a table of contents,
clarified chapter designations, and touched some of the
tag lines; he substituted phrases and single words: "feed
ing place" became "hash house"; "as," "that," "towards,"
"cheering," became "so," "this," "toward," and "cheer-
ingly"; and he removed a reference to the non-smoking
Vane lighting a cigar. No version of Honest John Vane
with extensive revisions comparable to those he made in
Miss RaveneTs Conversion, Kate Beaumont, and Playing
The Mischief exists among the De Forest manuscripts
now preserved in Yale University Library.

Receiving the author's signature on their contract 23
September 1874, Richmond & Patten before the end of
the year produced one of the best-printed of De Forest's
novels. The small 4% x 7 volume of 259 pages, bound

in dark orange cloth with the title stamped in thick gilt
on spine and side, avoided the many irritating misprints
of Miss Ravenel's Conversion, the double columns of
Kate Beaumont and Playing The Mischief, and the small
type of Overland. But the New Haven firm met the fate
of De Forest's earlier New York and Boston publishers,
for Richmond & Patten also went bankrupt and sus
pended publication.

THE NOVELS OF
J.W.De FOREST

WITCHING TIMES 1856

SEACLIFF 1859

MISS RAVENEL'S CONVERSION 1867

OVERLAND 1871

KATE BEAUMONT 1872

THE WETHEREL AFFAIR 1873

HONEST JOHN VANE 1875

PLAYING THE MISCHIEF 1875

JUSTINE'S LOVERS 1878

IRENE THE MISSIONARY 1879

THE BLOODY CHASM 1881

A LOVER'S REVOLT 1898

The date after each novel, with the exception of Witching Times,
is that of first book publication.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

1 Honest John as a Lover e7

2 Hopeless in Love, but Hopeful in Politics 73

3 Running for Congress and Winning a Smile 81

4 Representative Vane's Eminent Fitness 89

5 Olympian Encouragements 97

6 A Second Shot Hits the Mark 103

7 Making the Ends Meet in Washington 109

8 A Special Legislator and his Agent us

9 A Special Legislators Views of
Congressional Usefulness . 123

10 Honest John Resists Temptation 129

11 A Discontented Wife 137

12 An Eminent Senator 145

13 Running in Debt and Asking Advice 151

14 Painful Economy and another Temptation 161

15 Honesty in Decadence 167

16 Satan's Messenger Triumphant 173

17 Weathercock John 179

18 A Carcass fattening on Carcasses 185

19 Campaign Lies Nailed to the Counter 19 1

20 A Coming Shadow of Punishment 197

21 Love my Wife, love Me 205

22 Dodging and Skulking 213

23 The Investigation 219

24 Weathercock John Triumphant 225

of the most fateful days of John Vane's
life was the day on which he took board with that gen
teel though decayed lady, the widow of a wholesale New
York grocer who had come out at the little end of the
horn of plenty, and the mother of two of the prettiest
girls in Slowburgh, Mrs. Renssaelaer Smiles.

Within a week he was in a state of feeling which made
him glance frequently at the eldest of these young ladies,
and within a month he would have jumped at a chance
to kiss the ground upon which she trod. In the interval
he ventured various little attentions, intended to express
his growing admiration and interest, such as opening the
door for her when she left the dining-room, taking off
his hat with a flourish when he met her in the hall, join
ing her now and then in the street, "just for a block or
two," and once tremulously presenting her with a bou
quet.

He would have been glad to run much more boldly
than this in the course of courtship, but his heart was in
such a tender-footed condition that he could not go oth
erwise than softly. In his worshiping eyes Miss Olympia
Smiles was not only a lovely phenomenon, but also an
august and even an absolutely imposing one. Notwith-

standing that she was the daughter of his landlady, and
held but a modest social position even in our unpreten
tious little city, she had an unmistakable air of fashion
able breeding and boarding-school finish, such as might
be expected of a lady who had passed her early youth
in opulence. Moreover, she drew about her an admiring
bevy of our university undergraduates, who, by their
genteel fopperies and classic witticisms, made Vane feel
ill at ease in their presence, although he strove manfully
in secret to despise them as mere boys. Finally, she was
handsome and impressively so, tall, shapely, and grand
in figure, superb and even haughty in carriage, with a
rich brunette coloring which made him think of Cleo
patra, and with glowing dark eyes which pierced even
to his joints and marrow.

The one circumstance which encouraged Vane to as
pire after this astral being was the fact that she seemed
older than most of the undergraduate planets who re
volved about her, throwing him for the present into
sorrowful eclipse. He thought that she must be twenty-
three, and he sometimes trusted that she might be twen
ty-five, or perhaps twenty-seven. At the same time he
so reverenced her that he could not have been tortured
into believing that she was a veteran flirt, trained to
tough coquetry in many a desperate skirmish. Often and
often had Olympia "sat up" with a young man till after
midnight, and then gone up stairs and passed her mo
ther's bedroom door on her hands and knees, not in
penance and mortification of spirit, but in mere anxiety
to escape a lecture.

Of these melodramatic scenes John Vane knew noth
ing, and desired to know nothing. We must add also,
as indicative of his character and breeding, that, had he
been minutely informed of them, he would have thought

none the less of Miss Smiles. In the first place he was
so fascinated by her that he would have pardoned almost
any folly or imprudence in her bygone history. In the
second place, he had been brought up in a simple stra
tum of society, where girls were allowed large liberties
in sparking, even to the extent of arms around the waist
and much kissing, without incurring prudish condemna
tion. Indeed, so far was he from being fastidious in
these matters, that, when he heard that Olympia had
been engaged to one or more students, and that these
juvenile bonds had been promptly severed, he was rather
pleased and cheered by the information than otherwise.

"She must be about sick of those young jackanapes,"
he hopefully inferred. "She must be about ready to take
up with a grown man, who knows what he wants, and
has some notion of sticking to a bargain, and is able to
do the decent thing in the way of supporting her."

John Vane was himself, both in person and in repute,
no despicable match. As may have been already guessed
by such readers as are fitted to apprehend his character
and find instruction in his history, he was one of those
heroes of industry and conquerors of circumstances
known as self-made men, whose successes are so full of
encouragement to the millions born into mediocrity, and
whom, consequently, those millions delight to honor.

Had he really fabricated himself, whether we speak
of his physical structure or of his emotional nature, he
would have accomplished a rather praiseworthy job of
creation. Very few better looking men or kinder hearted
men have ever paraded the streets of Slowburgh in Ma
sonic caparisons. Justly proportioned, with ample with
ers, a capacious barrel, and limbs that were almost ma
jestic, he stood nearly six feet high in his stockings,
weighed full two hundred pounds in the same, and was

69

altogether an uncommonly fine animal. It is true that, to
use his own jovial phrase, he "ran a little too much to
blubber for comfort"; but it was disposed so becomingly
and carried so easily, that it did not prevent him from
moving with grace; while even his political enemies had
to admit that it conspicuously enhanced his dignity, and
justified his admirers in talking of him for governor.

His face, too, usually passed for handsome; it was
fairly regular in feature, and of a fresh blonde color like
that of a healthy baby; moreover, it had the spiritual
embellishment of a ready, courteous, and kindly smile.
It was only the fastidiously aristocratic and the micro
scopically cultivated who remarked of this large and
well-moulded figure-head that it lacked an air of high-
breeding and was slightly vacuous in expression. These
severe critics found the genial blue eyes which fascin
ated humble people as uninteresting as if they had been
made of china-ware. They hinted, in short, that John
Vane's beauty was purely physical, and had no moral
or intellectual significance.

To this height of sentimental fault-finding Miss Olym-
pia Smiles had not attained. New-Yorker by birth though
she was, and polished by long-continued friction against
undergraduate pundits, she was not a soul of the last
and most painful finish. She could not see but that Mr.
Vane was, from every point of view, sufficiently hand
some. Still she did not feel much pleased with his ob
vious admiration, nor desire at all to lure him on to the
point of love-making. There were imperfections in him
which grated upon her sensibilities, far as these were
from being feverishly delicate.

In the first place, she found his conversation rather
uninteresting and distinctly "common." He could only
talk freely of politics, business, and the ordinary news

70

of the day; he had no sparkles of refined wit and no
warm flashes of poesy; he was a little given to coarse
chaffing and to slang. For instance, he one day said to
his vis-a-vis at table, "Harris, please to scull that butter
over this way"; and, what made the matter worse, he
said it with a self-satisfied smile, as though the phrase
were original and irresistibly humorous. It was unpleas
ant also to hear him remark every morning, alluding to
the severity of the weather, that "the thermometer was
on a bender." Such metaphors might do in students and
other larkish, agreeable youngsters; but in a mature man,
who pretended to be marriageable, they argued dullness
or vulgarity. Finally, Olympia plainly gathered from
Mr. Vane's daily discourse that he was pretty ignorant
of science, history, literature, and other such genteel sub
jects.

But there was a much more serious defect in this hand
some man, considered as a possible admirer. He was a
widower, and a widower with incumbrances. He had a
wife thirty years old in the graveyard, and he had two
children of eight and ten who were not there. It was
annoying to Olympia to see him help this boy and this
girl to buttered slapjacks, and then bend upon herself a
glance of undisguisable, tender appetite. Had he rolled
in his carriage and resided in a mansion on Saltonstall
Avenue, she might have been able to put up with his
weeds and his paternity; but in a mere manufacturer of
refrigerators, whose business was by no means colossal,
these trappings of woe and pledges to society were little
less than repulsive.

"I can never, never let him speak to me about it," said
the young lady, with excitement, when her mother hinted
to her that Mr. Vane seemed to be drifting toward an
offer; "he is so common!"

71

"You must get married some time, I suppose/' sighed
Mrs. Smiles, whose pride had had a fall as splintering
as that of Humpty Dumpty, and who found it hard work
to support two stylish daughters. "Men who are not
common are rare in our present circle."

"I would rather be an old maid than take a widower
with two children," asserted Olympia.

"But how would the old maid live in case her mother
should be removed?" asked the parent, pained in heart
by her own plain-dealing, but feeling that it was called
for.

The spinster who had never spun nor done any other
remunerative labor could not answer this question. Pres
ently it might have been observed that a tear was rolling
down her cheek. Hard, hard indeed is the condition of
a proud girl who sees herself encompassed by the thorny
hedges of poverty, with no escape therefrom but a de
tested match., a match as disagreeable to smell at as
one of the brimstone species.

"Don't throw away this chance without fairly consid
ering it," continued the widow. "Mr. Vane is a pros
perous man, and a growing man every way. He has good
manners, barring some slang phrases. He likes to talk
about sensible subjects and to inform himself. Ten years
hence you may find him your superior and have reason
to be proud of him. A clever wife would help him for
ward wonderfully. He is a man that the right kind of a
woman could make over and make fit for any circle."

72

was so

deeply interested in this subject that she talked much
more firmly and impressively than was her wont.

Her manner, however, was pathetically mild and meek,
as of a woman who is accustomed to be trampled upon
by misfortune, and of a mother who has learned to bow
down to her children.

She was a somewhat worn creature; originally, indeed,
of fair outlines both physical and spiritual; but consid
erably rubbed out and defaced by the storms of adversi
ty. She reminded one of those statues which travelers
have seen in Italian court-yards, which were once, no
doubt, rounded, vigorous, clean-cut, sparkling, and every
way comely, but which, being made of too soft a marble,
or beaten upon too long by winds and rains, have lost
distinctness of lineament and brightness of color. "A
good liquor at the start, but too much matured some-
how'r nuther," judged one of her boarders, Mr. Jonas
Damson, the grocer.

Yet this seemingly dilapidated and really tottering
woman was the entire support, financially and morally,
of two healthy daughters. Why? Because she was a relic
of the time when ladies were not mere dandies; when

73

work steadily done and responsibility loyally borne
trained their characters into vigor; when they, like their
men, were producers as well as consumers. Mrs. Smiles
was not as highly educated as Olympia; she could not
talk, whether wisely or foolishly, of so many subjects;
but industrially and morally she was worth six of her.

Well, as this sorrowfully forethoughted mother had
foreseen, the proposal of marriage came at last. John
Vane popped the question with the terror and anguish
and confusion natural to a self-made man who is madly
in love with a "born lady." His tender heart, hysterical
with affectionate fear and desire, nearly pounded the
breath out of him while he uttered his message. What
he said he was not then sanely conscious of, and could
never afterwards distinctly remember. He may have
spoken as beautiful words as lover ever did, or he may
have expressed himself in the slang which Olympia found
so repellent. But five minutes later he had forgotten the
most momentous speech of his life; the particulars of it
had departed from him as irretrievably as the breath in
which they had been uttered; they were as completely
gone as the odors of last year's flowers. Olympiads re
sponse, however, remained engraven upon his soul with
sad distinctness; it was as plain as, "Sacred to the mem
ory of," cut into the marble of a gravestone.

"Mr. Vane, I sincerely respect you, and I thank you
for this mark of your esteem, but I cannot be your wife,"
was the decorous but unsympathetic form of service
which she read over his hopes.

He essayed to implore, to argue his suit, to ask why,
etc. But she would not hear him. "It cannot be," she
interrupted, hastily and firmly; "I tell you, Mr. Vane, it
cannot be."

74

And so, what seemed to him his ghost, went out from
her presence, to walk the earth in cheerless unrest.

Of course, however, there was yet hope in the depths
of his wretchedness, like a living though turbid spring
of water in the bottom of a ruined well. He still wanted
this girl; meant to bring her somehow to favor his suit;
trusted in cheerful moments that she would yet be his.
How should he move her? His friend, Mr. Jonas Dam
son,, to whom he confided his venture and shipwreck,
said to him, "J onn > you must show her your dignified
side. Don't stay here and look melted butter at her, and
cry in your coffee. Don't make a d d fool of yourself,
John, right under her nose. If you can't keep a good face
on the business here, quit the house. Show her your
independence. Let her see you can live without her.
Sorry to lose you, John, from your old chair; but as a
friend, I say 5 look up another hash house."

So, despite the plaintive reluctance of Mrs. Smiles, and
despite his own desire to gaze daily upon his fair tor
mentor, the rejected lover changed residence. A rival
boarding-house received John Vane and his two children,
and his weekly payment of forty dollars. Next, after a
little period of nerveless stupor, he rushed into the arena
of politics. A politician of some local note, he was al
ready able to send to the polls a "crowd" of the artisans
whom he employed,, or who knew him favorably as an
old comrade in handicraft, and was consequently a sure
candidate for the city council from his own ward, and
a tolerably strong one for the State legislature.

Happily for his reawakened ambition, there had been
a scandal of late among the "men inside politics." The
member of Congress from the district of Slowburgh had
been charged, and proved guilty too, of taking a one
thousand dollar bribe from the "Gulf of Mexico and

75

Caribbean Sea Steam Navigation Company." Some old
war-horses of the party, after vainly trying to hush the
matter up, had decided to throw the Honorable James
Bummer overboard.

"Bummer never could run again/' they unanimously
neighed and snorted. "To try to carry Jim Bummer
would break down the organization. Jim must take a
back seat, at least until this noise about him blows over,
and give some fresh man a chance. A man, by George,
that would cut the cherry-tree, and then tell of it, wasn't
fit to guide the destinies of his country."

On the other hand, the personal friends of Bummer,
that is to say,, the men whom he had put into "soft places,"
or who had shared his "perks/* supported him for many
cogent reasons. They charged his enemies with encour
aging the Copperheads and the Ku-Klux; with dishonor
ing American institutions in the face of monarchial Eur
ope and of high Heaven, both apparently hostile
countries; worst of all, and what was insisted upon with
the bitterest vehemence, they charged them with de
moralizing the party, as if Bummer had moralized it.
They denied the bribe doubly: first, they asserted that
their man had accepted no stock in said Steam Naviga
tion Company; second, they affirmed that he had as
much right to own stock in it as any other citizen. They
were stubborn and very uproariously wrathful, and not
feeble in point of following. It was evident that the bat
tle which must take place in the nominating caucus
would be very fiercely contested. The friends of reform
were forced to concede that, if they did not put up a
candidate of admittedly high character and of great per
sonal popularity, the meretricious veteran who now car
ried the banner of the district would continue to carry it.
The whole momentous struggle, too, must center in the

76

aforesaid caucus. Of course, after this mysterious agency
had decided who should head the party, no good Repub
lican could "go back on" the nominee, though he were
the impenitent thief.

"John Vane, you must be there to-night," said Mr.
Darius Dorman to our hero, a few hours previous to the
caucus. "We may want you like the Devil," he added,
without considering the precise uncomplimentary sense
of the comparison.

Darius Dorman called himself a broker or general busi
ness man; he shaved notes when he had money, and
when he had none speculated in city lots; he was always
on the lookout for public jobs, such as paving contracts,
and the supply of stores to the State militia; of late he
was reported to be "engineering something through Con
gress." A very sooty and otherwise dirty chore this last
must have been, if one might judge of it by the state of
his linen, his hands, and even his face. Indeed, there was
about Dorman such a noticeable and persistent tendency
toward griminess, that it seemed as if he must be charged
with some dark, pulverous substance, which shook
through the interstices of his hide. Soap and water were
apparently of no more use to him than they would be
to a rag-baby of coarse calico stuffed with powdered
charcoal instead of sawdust. His collar, his cuffs, his
haggard, ghastly features, his lean, griping claws, his
very fingernails, were always in a somber condition,
verging in spots towards absolute smirch. This opaque
finish of tint, coupled with a lean little figure and a lively,
eager action, caused some persons to liken him to a
scorched monkey. Other persons, whose imaginations
had been solemnized by serious reading, could not look
upon him without thinking of a goblin fresh from the
lower regions, who had not found time since he came on

77

earth to wash himself thoroughly. In truth, if you ex
amined his discoloration closely, you distinguished a tint
of ashes mingled with the coal smirch, so that a vivid
fancy might easily impute to him a subterranean origin
and a highly heated history. Another poetical supposi
tion concerning him was, that his dusky maculations and
streakings were caused by the exudations of an exceed
ingly smutty soul. His age was unknown; no one in
Slowburgh knew when he was born, nor so much as
where he came from; but the iron-grey of his unkempt,
dusty hair suggested that he must be near fifty.

'They mean to put up Saltonstall against Bummer,
don't they?" asked John Vane, with a languid air,, as if
he took little interest in the caucus.

"Yes, but it won't work," replied Dorman. "Saltonstall
is altogether too much of a gentleman to get the nom
ination. He's as calm and cold and dead as his buried
ancestors, the old governors. You can't get people to hur
rah for a gravestone, even if it has a fine name on it. In
fact, the fine name is a disadvantage; American freemen
hate an aristocrat. It's really curious to see how Salton-
stalTs followers are killing him off. They are saying that,
because he is the son of an honorable, he ought to be
an honorable himself, and that he will do the right thing
for the sake of his forefathers. Our voters don't see it in
that light. They want plain people to become honorables.
Besides, who wants a Congressman to be fussy? The
chaps inside politics know that they won't get any favors
out of a man who has a high and mighty character to
nurse. I tell you that Saltonstall won't get the nomina
tion. Bummer won't get it either. Some third man is
bound to come in; and you may be the very fellow. So,
don't fail to be on hand, Vane. Everything depends on
your showing yourself. When you are called for, rise

up to the full height of your manly figger, and see what
a yell thereTl be for Honest John Vane/'

"O, pshaw! nonsense, now," smiled Vane, shaking his
large and shapely head; but none the less he resolved
to attend the caucus, and, indeed, positively promised to
do so.

Darius

Dorman was noted for his unfulfilled prophecies, for
instance, frequently making business predictions which
caused such widows and orphans as believed in him to
lose their money, he on this occasion hit the nail of
the future pretty squarely on the head.

As soon as the caucus had been organized and had
listened to a pair of brief speeches urging harmonious
action, it split into two furiously hostile factions, each
headed by one of the gentlemen who had talked har
mony. Fierce philippics were delivered, some denounc
ing Bummer for being a taker of bribes and a pilferer of
the United States Treasury, and some denouncing Sal-
tonstall (as near as could be made out) for being a
gentleman. So suspicious of each other's adroitness were
the two parties, and so nearly balanced did they seem
to be in numbers, that neither dared press the contest
to a ballot. The war of by no means ambrosial words
went on until the air of the hall became little less than
mephitic, and the leading patriots present had got as
hoarse and nearly as black in the face as so many crows.
At last, when accommodation was clearly impossible, and
the chiefs of the contending parties were pretty well

fagged with their exertions, Darius Dorman sprang to
his feet (if, indeed, they were not hoofs), and proposed
the name of his favored candidate.

"I beg leave to point the way to a compromise which
will save the party from disunion and from defeat/' he
screamed at the top of a voice penetrating enough to
cleave Hell's thickest vapors. "As Congressman for this
district,. I nominate Honest John Vane."

Another broker and general contractor, whose prompt
inspiration, by the way, had been previously cut and
dried with great care, instantly and, as he said, spon
taneously seconded the motion. Then, in rapid succes
sion, a workingman who had learned the joiner's trade
with Vane, and a Maine liquor law orator who had more
than once addressed fellow-citizens in his teetotal com
pany, made speeches in support of the nomination. The
joiner spoke with a stammering tongue and a bewildered
mind, which indicated that he had been put up for the
occasion by others, and put up to it, too, without regard
to any fitness except such as sprang from the fact of his
being one of the "hard-handed sons of toil," a class
revered and loved to distraction by men whose business
it is to "run the political machine/' The practised orator
palavered in a fluent, confident sing-song, as brassily
penetrating as the tinkle of a bell, and as copious in
repetitions. "Let the old Republican," he chanted, "come
out for him; let the young Republican come out for him;
let the Democrat, yea, the very Democrat, come out for
him; let the native-born citizen come out for him; let the
foreign-born citizen come out for him; let the Irishman,
and the German, and the colored man come out for him;
let the cold-water temperance man come out for him; let
the poor, tremulous, whiskey-rotted debauchee come out
for him; let the true American of every sort and species

82-

come out for him; let all, yea, all men come out for awn-
est Jawn Vane!"

There was no resisting such appeals, coming as they
did from the "masses." The veteran leaders in politics
saw that the "cattle/* as they called the common herd of
voters, were determined for once to run the party char
iot, and most of them not only got out of the way,, but
jumped up behind. They were the first to call on Vane
to show himself, and the first to salute his rising with
deafening applause, and the last to come to order. A
vote was taken on his nomination, and the ayes had it
by a clear majority.

Then Darius Dorman proposed, for the sake of party
union, for the sake of the good old cause, for the sake
of this great Republic, to have the job done over by
acclamation. There was not an audible dissenting voice;
on the contrary, there was "wild enthusiasm." The old
war-horses and wheel-horses and leaders all fell into the
traces at once, and neighed and snorted and hurrahed
until their hard foreheads dripped with patriotic perspir
ation, every drop of which they meant should be paid
for in municipal or State or Federal dollars.

Many elders of the people escorted Vane home that
evening, and sat up with him with a devotion which
deserved no end of postmasterships. Of all these ad
mirers, however, the one who snuggled closest and stayed
latest, was that man of general business, Darius Dorman.

"John, a word with you y " he began confidentially, after
his rivals had all departed, at the same time drawing
close up to Vane's side, and insinuating a dark, horny
claw into one of his buttonholes; "I think you must own,
John, that I have done more than any other man to help
you into this soft thing. Would you mind hearing a word
of advice?"

"Go on," replied Vane, with that cheery, genial smile
which had done so much toward making him popular;
"I owe you an oyster supper."

"You'll owe me a good many, if you follow my coun
sel/' continued Dorman. "Now listen to me. You'll be
elected; that's a sure thing. But after that, what? Why,
you've got a great career open to you, and you may suc
ceed in it, or you may fail. It all depends on what branch
of politics you work at. Don't go into the war memories
and the nigger worshiping; all those sentimental dodges
are played out. Go into finance. The great national
questions to be attended to now are the questions of
finance. Spread yourself on the tariff, the treasury, the
ways and means, internal improvements, subsidy bills,
and relief bills. Dive into those things, and stick there.
It's the only way to cut a figure in politics and to make
politics worth your while/'

"I've thought of that already," replied Vane hopefully.
"It's my line, you know, business, money-matters,
practical finance."

"Exactly!" assented Dorman. "Well, throw yourself
on it, especially internal improvements and subsidy bills,
that sort of thing. When you get in, I shall have a
scheme to propose to you which you'll like to push.
Something big, something national, something on a grand
scale. If it goes through, it will make reputations, and
fortunes, too, for that matter/ 7 he added, with a glance
at Vane which was monkey-like in its sly greediness.

"I don't propose to go into Congress for money/' an
swered Honest John Vane.

"O, of course notl" leered Dorman. "You want honor,
and the respect of the country, and so on. Well, this is
just the kind of a measure that will fix the eyes of the

84

country on whoever carries it through. Youll be de
lighted with it, I know you will. However, I mustn't
blow it now; the time hasn't come. All I meant to say
was, that I wanted you to keep a hand ready for it when
it comes around. Well, that's all. I congratulate you, I
do, with all my heart. Good-night/'

Next day all Slowburgh was talking of Vane's unex
pected nomination for Congress. "Queer choice," said
some people. "Everything happens in politics. Vane is
as ignorant of real public business as he is of Sanscrit."
Others remarked, "Well, we shall have a decent man in
the place. John is a good-hearted,, steady, honest fellow.
Not very brilliant, but he will learn the ropes as others
have; and then he is so confounded honest!"

After a nomination, as we Americans know by weari
some experience, there must be an election. The struggle
between the two great and noble parties of the ins and
the outs which divided Slowburgh was on this occasion
unusually vehement. The opposition, trusting to the di
visions which they supposed to exist in the administra
tion ranks, made such a fight as despair makes when it
changes to hope.

Many of those genteel and highly cultivated persons
who ordinarily hate politics became excited; and among
these abnormally agitated ones was Miss Olympia Smiles.
It seems very strange, and yet it was natural. Discover
ing that her rejected suitor had become an object of
interest to all Slowburgh, she also, by mere human in
fection or contagion, began to find him interesting. We
know how women go on when they once begin; we re
member how, during the war, they flung their smiles,
their trinkets, and seemingly their hearts, to unintroduced
volunteers; we have all seen them absorb enthusiasm
from those around, and exhale it with doubled heat. So

85

it went, during that political crisis, with the young lady
in question. Before the campaign had roared half-way
through its course, she was passionately interested in it,
and electioneered for her preferred candidate even to
her mother's Democratic boarders.

"Measures are of little consequence/' she declared
when she was argued with and confuted by these preju
diced individuals. "What we want and all that we want
is good men in high places. And, if I had a vote," she
frequently asserted with a convincing blush, so beautiful
was it, "if I had a vote, it should go for Honest John
Vane/*

Honest John heard of this and of other similar speeches
of Olympiads, and they seemed to him altogether the
most eloquent efforts of the campaign. They gave him a
joy which a connoisseur in happiness might envy,
a joy which more than once, when he was alone, brought
the tears into his eyes. He had cherished no spite against
the girl because she had refused him; and he did not
now say to himself scornfully that she would like to be
the wife of a Congressman, but that it was too late; he
was too thoroughly a good fellow and true lover to se
crete any such venom of thought or feeling. The hope
that he might yet win Olympia Smiles, and devote to her
such part of his life as his country and the refrigerator
business could spare, opened to him the prospect of a
little heaven upon earth. Meeting her one day in the
street, he ventured to stop her, thanked her stammer-
ingly for her favorable wishes, pressed her hand with
unconscious vehemence, and parted from her with a
swimming head.

Olympia was sensible enough and sensitive enough to
carry away a rejoiced heart from this interview. She
knew now that she could still have this hero of the hour,

86

and she began to find that she wanted him, at least a
little. He was no longer common and, metaphorically
speaking, unclean in her patrician eyes. She looked after
his tall, robust figure as it went from her, and thought
how manly and dignified and even handsome it was. His
condition of widowerhood became vague to her mind;
the gravestone of his wife vanished like a ghost overtaken
by daybreak; even his two cherished children could not
cast a shadow over her feelings. It would surely be
something fine to enter the capital of the nation as the
wife of one of the nation's law-givers; it would at least
be far better than growing into old-maidenhood amid
the sordid anxieties of a boarding-house. Aristocratic as
her breed was, and delicate as had been her culture, the
title of Mrs. John Vane tempted her. Should she throw
a net for this man, drag him back to her feet, and accept
him? Well, perhaps so; but first she would see whether
he carried his election; she must not be caught by a mere
prophecy of greatness and glory.

Let us not be severe upon the young lady because of
her prudence, asserting that she carried it to the point
of calculating selfishness. As far as concerned love-mak
ing, this was her first essay in that deliberate virtue; and
impartial psychology will not express angry surprise at
her over-doing it a little, so much is the human mind
ruled by the law of undulation or pulsation, or, in other
words, so apt is it to go from one extreme to another.
Besides, in a matter so permanently serious to woman
as marriage, it is pardonable and even praiseworthy that
she should be cautious.

87

Honest John Vane triumphed
at the polls, and became member of Congress for the
district of Slowburgh.

Let us glance now at his qualifications for the splendid
and responsible position of which his fellow-citizens had
pronounced him worthy.

He was, to use a poetical figure, in the flower of his
age, or, to use a corresponding arithmetical figure, about
thirty-five.

He had, as he and his admirers supposed, fully formed
his character, and settled it on a stable platform of
worthy habits and creeds.

He was commercially honest, indefatigably industri
ous, a believer in the equal rights of man, a strenuous
advocate of the Maine liquor law, a member,, if I am not
greatly mistaken, of the church, and every way in good
repute among grave, conscientious people.

His "war record" was admitted to be unimpeachable;
that is to say, he had consistently and unflinchingly de
nounced the Rebellion "from its inception"; if he had
not fought for the Union on the battle-field, he had
fought for it on the stump and in the chimney-corner.

89

In all his geographical sentiments he was truly Ameri
can, even to occasional misunderstanding of our foreign
affairs, and to the verge of what one might call safe
rashness.

He wanted somebody (meaning of course somebody
else ) to thrash England well for the Trent affair, and to
annihilate her for the Alabama outrages. He affirmed in
one of his public "efforts" that our claim for indirect
damages should be prosecuted, if necessary, "before the
court of high Heaven," which phrase he always regarded
as one of his happiest inspirations, although he had
found it "in the paper."

He contended that it was our mission, and conse
quently our duty to interfere in behalf of oppressed Cuba
by bringing it within the pale of our own national debt,
and generally to extend the area of freedom over such
countries as would furnish us with a good market for
our home productions, and a mild climate for our in
valids.

At the same time he did not want to go to war for
these benevolent purposes; for war, as he frequently
remarked, was a frightful thing, and we had already shed
blood enough to show that we would fight rather than
submit to outrage; he only proposed that we "should sit
still in our grandeur and let those fellows gravitate to
ward us/*

His views concerning internal affairs were marked by
an equal breadth and thickness. He held that the in
dustry of the American producer should be protected,
at no matter what cost to the American consumer.

He was opposed to the introduction of Chinese cheap
labor as being injurious to the "noble class of native
artisans," however it might benefit our equally noble

90

fanners by furnishing them with low-priced tools, shoes,
and clothing.

He believed that our system of government was the
purest and most economical in the world, when it was
not abused by municipal rings, public defaulters, railroad
legislation, and lobbyists of the State and national capi
tals.

He argued that rotation in office is republican, because
it "gives every citizen a fair chance"; and that it is a
means of national education, because it tempts even the
dregs of society to aspire to responsibility and power.

In the whole superficies of our civil affairs he saw but
one error which needed serious and instant attention,
namely, the franking privilege. If that could be removed,
and two millions thereby saved annually out of a budget
of three or four hundred millions, he thought that the
legislative sun of American democracy would be left
without a spot, the exemplar and despair of other tax-
laden nations.

Such was the optimist and amiable patriotism of Con
gressman Vane. While we cannot but admire it from a
sentimental point of view, we are obliged to regret that
it did not rise from a wider base of information. Wheth
er the conclusions of this self-taught statesman were right
or wrong, they were alike the offspring of ignorance, or
at best of half knowledge. We can only palliate his dark-
mindedness with regard to American politics on the
ground that it was cosmically impartial, and extended to
the politics of all other countries, ancient and modern.

He had never heard that our civil institutions were not
exclusively our own invention, but germinated naturally
from the colonial charters granted by "tyrannical Britain."
He believed that, because Queen Victoria cost England

91

half as much annually as Boss Tweed cost the single city
of New York, therefore England ought to be and must
be on the verge of a revolution. He supposed that Prus
sia must be an unlettered and dishonestly governed
country, because it is ruled by a king. Of the ancient
states of Greece he had a general idea that they were
republics, with some form or other of representative gov
ernment, Sparta being as much a democracy as Athens.
It would have been news to him, as fresh as anything
arriving by telegraph, that Attica was legislated for by a
single municipality, and that its inhabitants were three-
fourths slaves, The Rome of his mind was also a repre
sentative democracy, and its conscript fathers were,, per
haps, selected by conscription, like recruits for some
armies. Of the tyranny of capitalists and of the corrup
tion of magistrates and tax-collectors in that most famous
of all republics, he was as ignorant as he was, or strove
to be, of similar phenomena in the United States. His
reading in ancient history began and ended with Rollin,
to the exclusion of Niebuhr, Arnold, Grote, Curtius, and
Mommsen, of whom, indeed, he had never heard. It may
be thought that, for the sake of a joke, I am exaggerating
Mr. Vane's Eden-like nakedness and innocence; but I do
solemnly and sadly assure the reader that I have not
robbed him of a single fig-leaf of knowledge which be
longed to him.

As for political economy, he had never seen a line of
Adam Smith,. Mill, Bastiat, or any of their fellows; they
not being quoted in "the papers" which furnished his
sole instruction in statesmanship, and almost his sole lit
erary entertainment. He was too completely unaware of
these writers and of their conclusions to attack them
with the epithet of theorists or of doctrinaires. All that

92

he knew of political economy was that Henry C. Carey
had written some dull letters about it to the Tribune,
and that the Pennsylvania iron-men considered him "an
authority to tie to." His vague impression was that the
science advocated the protection o native manufactures,
and that consequently it would be worth looking into
whenever he found a moment's respite from business and
politics.

Certainly, it was wonderful how little this self-taught
soul could see into a millstone, even when it was his own
and he ground at it daily. He was a manufacturer of re
frigerators; and very thankful indeed was he that Con
gress had imposed high import duties on foreign speci
mens of that *line of goods"; it was patriotic and wise,
he thought, thus to protect American industry against
the pauper labor of Europe. Meantime, he did not con
sider that his zinc and hinges, and screws and nails, and
paint and varnish were taxed; that his own food, raiment,
fuel, and shelter, and also the food, raiment, fuel, and
shelter of his workmen, were likewise taxed; that, in
short, taxation increased the expense of all the materials
of labor and the necessaries of life which made up the
principal cost of his fabrics; and that it was mainly be
cause of these things that he was unable to produce re
frigerators at anything like the ante-tax prices.

The government put a little money into one of his
pockets and took the same sum or more out of several
others; and he was so far from seeing that the legerde
main did not help him, or perhaps hurt him, that he
enthusiastically sang praises to it. There had been a
time when he exported, when he could boast that a por
tion of his revenue came from beyond sea, when he had
hopes of building up a fine market abroad. Not so now;

93

foreigners could no longer afford to buy of him; they
made all their own refrigerators. John Vane did not com
prehend this adverse providence any more than if he
had himself been made of pine and lined with zinc. He
compendiously remarked, "Our prices rule too high for
those beggars," and was patriotically proud of the fact,
though sadly out of pocket by it. Such was his insight
into legislation where it directly concerned his own
bread and butter. You can imagine what a clear view
he had of those labyrinths of it which ramify through
the general body politic.

But if he was not an instructed soul, he was at all
events an honest one. That attribute all his fellow-citi
zens conceded to him, even those who did not see the
wisdom or beauty of it; it was a matter of common fame
in Slowburgh, and, one might almost say, of common
conversation. Men who could not get trusted for five
dollars spoke of him approvingly as "Honest John Vane,"
feeling, perhaps, that in so doing they imputed to them
selves a little of his righteousness, so illogical are the
mental processes of sinners.

It is worth while to relate (if only to encourage our
youth in the ways of virtue ) how easily he had acquired
this high repute. While a member of the State legislature
he had refused a small bribe from a lobbyist, and had
publicly denounced the briber. That this inexpensive
outburst of probity should secure him widespread and
permanent fame does not, to be sure, shed a very pleas
ing light over the character which is borne by our law
givers. But we will not enter upon that subject; it per
haps needs more whitewash than we possess. We will
simply call the attention of Sunday school pupils and
Young Men's Christian Associations to the cheering fact

that, at a prime cost of one hundred dollars, our towns
man was able to arise and shine upon a people noted
for its political purity as "Honest John Vane!" Only one
hundred in greenbacks (about ninety in gold) out of
pocket, and the days of Washington come again! I should
suppose that, for say twice the figure, a legislator of the
period might get the title of "Father of his Country."

95

as we have described was John
Vane's slender outfit for the labors and responsibilities
of a Congressman at the time he became one.

Was it sufficient? Slowburgh, taken collectively,
thought it was. He was too ignorant to be a professor
in the State university, or even a teacher in one of the
city schools; but it was presumed that he would answer
well enough as a law-giver for a complicated Republic
containing forty millions of people.

The great majority of his constituents did not suppose
that their representative needed any more intelligence
or moral stamina than would just enable him to find out
what were the "party measures/' and faithfully to vote
for them. The few who believed that he ought to be
acquainted either with finance, or political economy, or
constitutional limitations, or international law, and that
furthermore he should be a person of tried character
and honor, these few eccentrics had no political in
fluence. Such were the happy-go-lucky credences at
which universal suffrage had arrived in this exceptional
district of Slowburgh.

But as this state of public opinion was not John Vane's
work, we must neither blame him nor praise him for it.

97

We ought even to take a respectful and compassionate
interest in him, as a good-hearted man of fair repute who
was about to be severely tried by temptation, and who,
even in his hour of triumph, had his pathetic hopes and
fears. It is creditable to his sentimental nature that, amid
all the visions of greatness which naturally flocked about
him, he did not forget his love for the daughter of the
boarding-house keeper, but rather remembered her the
more tenderly because he had a sort of throne to share
with her. When he heard that he was elected, his first
desire was to seek her presence and offer himself once
more. In this mind he faithfully remained; but how
should he transform it into deed? Having been refused
by her, and having departed from her mother's house,
really in humble sorrow, but seemingly in lofty dudgeon,
he simply supposed that he must not call upon her.

Should he write? Well, it is very strange to tell, but
nevertheless it is solemnly true, that this Congressman
elect distrusted his ability to compose a suitable epistle
for the occasion. Of course he could spell correctly, and,
as for business letters, he wrote a dozen or so a day, and
very good ones too. A speech also he could make, for
nature had given him that commonplace fluency of utter
ance which does so much duty in our public affairs, and
he had acquired confidence in delivery by practice in
caucuses, debating-clubs, and, if I do not err, in prayer-
meetings. But in English composition of the elegant and
delicate sort, he was entirely inexperienced. He said to
himself that, if he should write a declaratory note to
Miss Smiles, something common,, something lacking in
high breeding, might creep into it, which would be sure
to disgust this genteel and highly educated young lady,
and cause her, as he stated it in his anxious mind, "to

98

put another veto on him." So, for several days, our states
man elect -walked the streets of the city which had de
lighted to honor him, with a prevalently humble and
troubled spirit.

Accident at last favored him; or, perhaps, it may have
been a stroke of feminine providence; for women do
sometimes condescend to order their own destinies. Once
again Olympia Smiles met him on the street, and most
graciously allowed herself to be stopped by him, if, in
deed, she did not herself do the stopping. Vane was for
a moment dumb, for he remembered that he had nothing
special to say to her except that he adored her, and it
did not seem to him quite proper to interview her just
there on that subject. Olympia came to his rescue with
that quickness of mind which young ladies rarely lose
and that mercy which they sometimes have.

"Mr. Vane,. I am glad to meet you," she smiled. It
was a very cordial speech surely, but it did not at all
diminish her maidenly dignity, so well did she know
how to rule her manner. "I have really longed to con
gratulate you on your victory," she continued. "It gives
me a great deal of pleasure."

"I thank you exceedingly," stammered John, blushing
with unspeakable joy and fright. "I heard you were good
enough to take my side during the campaign. I was very
much obliged to you for it, I am sure."

He showed no anger and he put on no dignity, though
he seemed to hear even then her humiliating words, "It
can never be." In the matter of loving, he was surely a
model soul, and, so far as that goes, well worth any
woman's -winning.

"Why don't you come and see us?" she resumed, after
a moment of natural hesitation over the entangling query.

99

"I had hoped that we should always remain good
friends."

She looked uncommonly attractive as she uttered this,
for there was an enchantment about her beyond that of
mere beauty. Her agitation not only filled her cheeks
with color, and her eyes with tremulous light, but drew
from her whole being a mysterious influence which we
might, perhaps, call a halo of enticement. She longed
so earnestly to bring her discarded lover back to her feet,
that he could not but be vaguely aware of the longing.

"I shall be delighted to call," replied John Vane, so
much moved that he could not devise a fine speech, but
delivering himself with the simplicity of high breeding.
"Will you allow me to see you this evening?"

"Yes," murmured Olympia, drawing her breath with
some difficulty. "Do come."

Then, unwilling to say more for fear of exposing her
feelings too clearly, she gave him a bewildering smile
and went her way. Her superb figure thrilled in every
vein with excitement, and she could hardly set her little
bootees upon the ground steadily. Citizen John Vane
had had no attractions for her; but she could not help
being drawn by the member of Congress. After the fash
ion of women, she instinctively admired a man who rules
his fellow-men, and causes them to do him reverence.
As he, like all masculine flesh, adored beauty and deli
cacy, so she, like all feminine flesh,, worshiped strength
and authority.

That evening John called, in his best suit, at his old
boarding-house, and was received there with a warmth
which melted the icy past out of his mind. Mrs. Smiles,
who had always liked him, and who had been senti
mentally pained as well as financially injured by losing

100

him from her table, called up all her social graces of
bygone fashionable days to do him honor. Julia Maria,
Olympia's younger sister, only nineteen years old at the
time, saluted him in her pert but alluring way as "the
delegation from Slowburgh." Olympia herself, that ex
perienced though not hardened veteran of the world,
robed herself in just the right mixture of cordiality and
dignity. Both in a moral and in a wardrobe sense, she
had taken great pains to get herself up for the occasion.
She was arrayed in her best garnet silk; and we ought
to add the statement that it was her only really good and
fresh one, a pathetic circumstance in view of the fact
that she dearly loved gorgeous apparel, and that it suited
her style of beauty. The rich and noble color of the
garnet lent additional splendor to the flush on her bru
nette cheeks, and to the liquid sparkle of her dark eyes.
There was an emerald cross (a relic of her mother's
former prosperity) on her breast; and several rings, of
like moving history, sent out little glimmers of gentility
from her fingers. The fine raiment and the authentic
splendor of the jewels became her, and made her more
queenly, more like a Cleopatra, than even her wont.
John Vane had never before seen her so beautiful, and
he was dazzled to that degree that he forgot his own
political majesty, and sat before her on the edge of a
chair, a most humble Antony.

101

^f am truly rejoiced at your success, Mr. Vane/'
chanted the mother, who felt it her duty to open the
way toward full cordiality.

"We shall now have an honest man to represent us,"
she continued, repeating such political talk as she had
fully caught the sense of while serving her boarders.
"And a man of ability, too," she quickly added, vaguely
conscious that an imputation of honesty alone is small
praise. "Knowing what you have done in life hitherto,
I feel sure that you will be very useful in your new
sphere."

"Do manage, Mr. Vane, to have a gay season in Wash
ington," put in Julia Maria; "and then do get me an in
vite to spend the winter there."

Olympia lost a little of her air of repose, and glanced
uneasily at her sister. Was it within the range of possi
bility that this young chit should skip into the arena and
carry off the prize by dint of mere girlish forwardness
and flippancy? Mrs. Smiles also saw the peril, and, in
obedience to the eye of her eldest, sweetly sent Julia
Maria down stairs with a message to the cook.

"I don't know what sort of a figger I shall cut in Con
gress," observed John Vane,, modestly. "But you may be

103

sure, Mrs. Smiles, that I shall do my honest best. I hope
sincerely that I shall merit the compliments you are so
polite as to pay me."

"O, indeed you will!" broke in both mother and daugh
ter, eagerly.

"And yet, I should think you would tremble at the
thought of assuming such responsibilities/' continued
Mrs. Smiles, gazing with real veneration at her once
favored boarder, now the choice of the people. "It must
be such a terrible thing to decide on the President's sal
ary, and such-like important questions."

"O, that's very simplel" answered the Congressman
elect, pardonably anxious to show a little bit of his po
litical lore. "You see, the President's salary is fixed by
law, and there's no discussion over it."

"Yes, but you may have to vote on the law," pursued
the good lady, eager to make up some work for her hero.

"O, as to that," stammered Vane, who had been drawn
beyond his depth, "I dare say that may come up some
times! Of course, when it does, Congress attends to it."

"Certainly," chimed in Mrs. Smiles, delighted that it
should be so, because it enhanced her friend's glory. "I
remember hearing Mr. Smiles, my poor husband, this
was when we were in better circumstances, Mr. Vane,
I remember hearing him say that Congress is only
too powerful. He took a great interest in politics, Mr.
Smiles did. It is the business of a statesman, he used to
say. Often and often I've heard him say it."

By this time Olympia was glancing sidelong at her

mother, as she had previously glanced at her sister. Mrs.

Smiles noted the look and divined from it that she was

in the girl's way, and proceeded to remove herself.

"Dear me! I wonder if Julia gave my message," she

104

exclaimed, in a simulated tone of reminiscence. "Do
excuse me for a few moments, Mr. Vane. You know a
housekeeper has her affairs."

"Certainly, Mrs. Smiles," bowed John, who was re
joiced to have her depart, although he also felt nervous.

As soon as the two "young people" were left alone,
Olympia rose from the chair where she had been sitting
in isolated dignity, advanced to our Congressman with
an air of cordial interest, and placed herself by his side
on a sofa.

"Now tell me all about it," she murmured with a be
wildering smile. "I have so longed to question you! I
wanted to give you some intelligent sympathy. Tell me
all your plans of legislation, as far as it is proper to tell
them to a woman."

Such a gush from such a source was intoxicating to
the heart, and furthermore it was inspiring to the mind.
Some thousands of psychologists have already remarked
that a man can always talk easily, if you will let him
talk about himself and provide him with an interested
and interesting listener. John Vane at once lost his em
barrassment and found that this was indeed a land of
free speech. He had a fluent utterance, as we have al
ready indicated, and on this occasion he beat his best
time on the platform. He told all that he knew about
national politics, and some things which neither he nor
any other man ever knew.

"O, that will be noble work!" exclaimed Olympia,
when he had fully exposed his plan for renovating and
purifying the Republic by rescinding the franking privi
lege. "We shall all owe you a vast debt of gratitude," she
continued, without in the least comprehending how the
reform would benefit her or any other human creature.

105

"But do you think it possible to eradicate such an estab
lished and wide-spread abuse?" she continued, calling it
what he had called it, and thereby causing him to marvel
at her discrimination. "Here are all these greedy people
all over the country, crazy to get these big books and
reports that you speak of. How do you think they will
bear being deprived of them? Of course they will be
come your bitter enemies. Don't you think it would be
safer, and better in the long run, to begin with some
easier work, where there would not be millions to op
pose you? Of course I am dreadfully ignorant of these
political matters," she naively confessed, discovering by
his face that she had made some blunder, which she
certainly had as to the millions. "You must forgive me
for venturing suggestions. I ought not to try to discuss
matters so much above me. But I am eager to have you
succeed from the very start! O, so eager!" she added,
rolling up her fine eyes enthusiastically.

"O Miss Smiles! I do heartily thank you for your
interest," gasped John Vane, barely restraining himself
from falling on his majestic knees.

At this moment the impertinent cheap parlor clock
struck ten. Congressman Vane started and stared at its
round face with astonishment. Since Mrs. Smiles had
left the room "for a few moments," more than an hour
had elapsed.

"I must be going," he observed, remembering an ap
pointment, at ten precisely, with certain leading mana
gers of politics.

**O, it is not late!" pleaded Olympia. "I have but just
begun to get interested I mean, to understand these
matters."

But the Congressman felt that it would not do to let

106

his potent allies wait long, and, humbly pleading his
appointment, he persisted in rising.

"Do call again soon/' urged the young lady. "I want
to show you that I am still your friend, one of your
most sincere friends," she added fervently, giving him
her hand.

John Vane could not resist the temptation; he impul
sively pressed that hand to his lips. "You know how I
feel!" he gasped in apology, and then in haste made his
dizzy way to the door.

"O, how could you!" whispered Olympia in feigned
remonstrance. But her cheek was red with pride and
pleasure, and her parting glance was of a nature to fill
him with hope.

A sense of justice compels us to state that this young
lady was not merely a clever hypocrite, cold-heartedly
planning for herself a prosperous marriage. During the
two months in which John Vane had fought his election
fight and won his really brilliant victory, she had not only
lost all her early disdain of him, but had gradually
learned to admire him, to wish to win him, and to like
him. People are often loved, not merely for what they
are themselves, but also for their adventitious surround
ings. I myself feel that I might have a passion for a
tolerably plain queen, if her Majesty should distinctly
and magnificently encourage me. Just in this natural,
and therefore, I suppose, rational and proper manner,
Olympia "fancied" and in a certain sense loved Mr. Vane
because he was a Congressman and a celebrity.

A learned pig, or any other intellect of a second-rate
order, might predict with accuracy the result of such a
state of things. These two people, who so earnestly
wanted each other, soon managed to have each other.

107

But, although John Vane made an easy conquest, it was
none the less an unexpected one to him, and a matter
of great and keen joy. When he at last dared to say to
Olympia, "Will you be my wife?" and when she leaned
with downcast eyes toward him and whispered, "I will,"*
he was as much astonished with gladness as if he had
been received bodily into heaven. Just in that moment
his feelings, and we may hopefully venture to add hers
also, were as admirable and enviable as the emotions of
the most select and highly educated natures would aver
age under the same circumstances, and might easily be
accepted as the sure harbingers of a happy married life.
We shall see in the sequel, when Mr. and Mrs. Vane
come to be exposed to the temptations of Washington,
whether these seraphic visitants prophesied correctly.

TO*

due time John Vane took his lovely bride to
the national capital, and entered upon his triple career
as a social magnate, a lawgiver, and a reformer.

He was a bloomingly happy man at the period of that
advent, and he could surely allege satisfactory reasons
for his beatitude. He had attained eminence early in
life; there were few younger Congressmen than himself.
His fame as an incorruptible soul had preceded him; and
because of it he had been received by his brother legis
lators with a deference which spoke well for them: as if
they also were honest or admired probity theoretically,
or at the very least bowed to popular prejudice on the
subject. He had, as he supposed, a sure entry into the
hitherto unvisited region which he called high society,
and by his side walked a being who seemed to him per
fectly fitted to guide him among those Delectable Moun
tains. Finally, his wife was the object of his robust, un
divided affection, and, to the best of his knowledge and
belief, returned it with interest.

But, however pure and abundant may be the sources
of earthly joy, some turbid stream will ever and anon rile
them, bubbling up no doubt from the infernal regions.
Before long Vane discovered, or rather had it borne in

109

upon him, that Olympia was not pleased with her archi
tectural surroundings, nor with their upholstery attri
butes. His apartments, it must be conceded, were not
fine; they were just that kind of tarnished, frowsy lodg
ings which Congressmen of moderate means grumble at,
but perforce put up with; such lodgings as one is sure
to find abundantly in any city which is crowded during
one half of the year and deserted during the other half.
Even Vane, whose self-made career had not left him a
sybarite, was obliged to admit that the bedroom smelt
unpleasantly of a neighboring stable, and that the parlor
was dingy and scantily furnished.

"O, this shabby Washington!" Olympia soon began to
sigh. "What mean, musty, vile rooms! I don't see how
we came to take them. I'm sure nobody but poorhouse
people will visit us twice here."

"But, my dear petsy posy, what can be done?" gently
replied John. "They are the best we could find at the
figger, and the figger is as high as my pocket-book meas
ures. Just look at the whole thing now/' he continued,
patiently recommencing an argument which he had al
ready been driven to state more than once. 'Til show
you exactly how I stand. As a source of income the
refrigerator business don't count at present. I had to
take in a partner to carry on the shop; and whether
there'll be any profits or not I can't yet say. It won't be
safe, at least not for the first year, to estimate my re
ceipts at anything more than my Congressional salary.
What I have to live on, then, is just five thousand dol
lars, and no more."

"But that is a great deal," interrupted Olympia, who
had never had anything whatever to do with the board
ing-house responsibilities, and was consequently as ignor-

110

ant of the cost of living as Queen Victoria, and probably
a great deal more so.

"Well, that depends on the rate of outgo/' smiled the
husband, hoping vainly to render his logic palatable by
sugaring it with meekness. "Now, what are - our ex
penses? First, there are the two children. I wanted to
make things easy for your mother, and so I put then-
board at twenty-four dollars per week, which, with other
bills, such as clothing, schooling, doctoring, etc., will foot
up to eighteen hundred a year. It's awful, but I wanted
to make it light on the old lady."

He smiled again,, not noting how this reference to the
maternal poverty jarred on Olympia.

"Then our board and rooms here," he continued, "cost
forty dollars a week, and won't fall greatly below that
while we are in Slowburgh, besides which you want a
trip to Saratoga. So there goes another payment of two
thousand and eighty dollars. That makes three thousand
eight hundred and eighty, you see. All we have left for
everything else wardrobe, washing, servants, street
cars, hack-hire, and sundries is only eleven hundred
and twenty dollars. Can we fetch the twelve months
round on that? I don't know yet. But I'm sure, we
ought to wait and see, before we branch out any wider.
Just look at it, my dear petsy posy, for yourself."

"I hate arithmetic/' was the answer which dear petsy
posy accorded to this painstaking exposition of weighty
facts; "I always did hate it and always shall."

There are some persons so constituted that they will
get furious with a thermometer for proving that a room
is warm after they have pronounced it cold. Olympia,
who already felt discontented with her husband for
bringing her into these commonplace rooms, was little

111

less than angry at him because his arguments in favor
of retaining them were unanswerable. She did not care
one straw for his reasons, except to hate them for contro
verting her wishes.

"I did think that I should be allowed to live in some
style while I was in Washington," she continued to pout.
"This kind of thing," with a disdainful glance at her fur
nishings, "I suppose I can bear it, if I must; but I do say
that it is a very great disappointment to me/*

Having been married before, John Vane was not much
astonished at this persistence, but he could not help
being grieved by it. It did seem to him rather hard that
a wife whom he had taken out of the enforced frugality
of a boarding-house should be just as eager for grandeur
and as hostile to saving as if she had been reared in the
lap of luxury and had brought him a fortune. Further
more, a sad doubt, which has dolorously surprised many
a husband beside him, now sprang upon him for the first
time. "Is it possible," he asked himself, "that she is not
going to be satisfied with succeeding through my suc
cess, but means to make her own glory the centre of our
life?"

The first Mrs. Vane, whatever her shortcomings in
other respects, had been content with such an abode as
he could pay for, and had taken a pride in his growing
business. But here was a new style of helpmeet; a help
meet who apparently did not propose to live for him;
who, on the contrary, intended that he should live for
her, and that without regard to balancing his bank ac
count. She had got a Congressman; but that almost
continental fact did not satisfy her: she must have her
own separate empire and glory. In short, Vane began
dimly to suspect (although he did not at all know how

112

to phrase the matter to himself) that he had married a
"girl of the period/' that fairest and greediest of all vam
pires. Being love-bewitched, however, he did not really
believe in his calamity, and much less burst forth in
wrath or lamentation.

"Well, my dear, we'll see about it," he said, cheeringly.
'We'll keep our eyes open for some better shanty than
this, and if the dollars seem plenty we'll pop into it."

This conditional promise of finer surroundings Olympia
tacitly accepted as a positive agreement to provide the
same, and went out that very day in search of first-class
apartments, returning much annoyed at finding none va
cant. To soothe her disappointment she got fifty dollars
from her husband, purchased such damask curtains as
could be had therefor, and so embellished her parlor.
Vane winced a little; as a business man he saw that this
was a poor way to prepare for getting into better lodg
ings; as a business man also he hated to spend money
in lending attractions to another person's property. But
he tried to persuade himself that he had got off tolerably
cheap, and that his wife would learn economy and self-
control in the course of time. Then, like many another
Congressman who cannot rule his own expenditures, he
turned his attention to reforming those of the nation.

The first thing to be done was to get in his bill for the
abolition of the franking privilege. He had written it
out months ago, and touched it up ever so many times
since. After pulling aside those damask curtains in order
to give himself some light, he took his well-scratched
manuscript out of his trunk, and read it to himself aloud.
As is frequently the case with persons little accustomed
to composition, the sound of his own periods was agree
able to him, and the sense impressive, not to say sub-

113

lime. It seemed to him that it was a good bill; that it
was, all over its face and down its back, an honest man's
bill; that every respectable fellow in the House would
have to vote for it. He decided to make a clean copy
of it just as it was, without another syllable of useless
alteration. He had just squared himself and spread out
his legs and put his head on one side for this "chore,"
and was in the very act of flourishing his right hand
over the foolscap preparatory to executing a fine opening
capital, when he was arrested by a ring at his door-bell.
Presently in stamped his old acquaintance and most
adroit wire-puller, Mr. Darius Dorman, followed by a
stranger.

114

miracle having of late been performed for
the benefit of Dorman (who, indeed, may have been
altogether beyond the pale of heavenly interferences),
he was as ungraciously fashioned and as disagreeably
discolored as ever.

Earthly soap and water, it seemed, could not wash
away that suspicious smear of charcoal and ashes which
constituted his complexion, or which, perhaps, only hid
its real tint.

Blurred, blotched, smoke-dried, wilted, uneasy, and
agile, he looked and acted, as he had always looked and
acted, to mortal eyes, like either a singed monkey or a
bleached goblin, who had some unquenched sparks on
his hide that would not let him be quiet.

To this brownie in bad preservation the person who
accompanied him offered a pleasing contrast. He was
a man of near seventy, but still slender in build and of
an upright carriage; his face was long, venerably wrin
kled, firm in expression, and yet unctuous with mildness
and benevolence; his hair was long, straight, thin, and
of a gray which verged on the reverend gloss of pure
whiteness; his whole air was marked by a curious staid-
ness and circumspectness which seemed to promise as-

115

cetic virtue. One would have said that here was a soul
which had dwelt long on the pillar of self-sacrifice. If
there was a certain sharpness amounting almost to cun
ning in the half-shut, faded, cold gray eyes, it might
have been acquired, of course, by wary spying into the
ambushes of this wicked world, and be only a proof of
that serpent-like wisdom which goes properly with the
harmlessness of the dove. If there was a show of grip
about the close-shut mouth, as though it could hang on
to an advantage like a mastiff to a bone, perhaps it might
have resulted from a dogged struggle to hold fast to the
right. On the whole, this gentleman's appearance was
well calculated to inspire instant and entire confidence,
providing the beholder were disposed by education to
put faith in exteriors of the Puritanized cast.

"How are you, Vane?" exclaimed Dorman, cordially
extending one of those hands which had such an air of
having been rubbed in a fireplace. "Glad to see you at
last where you belong; glad to see one right man in the
right place. Let me make you acquainted with the Hon
orable Mr. Sharp, one of the leading members from the
good old Whetstone State," he explained referring to a
well-known Commonwealth. "Of course you have heard
of Mr. Simon Sharp, the great financier and practical
statesman. Mr. Sharp, this is Honest John Vane, the
workingman's man, the plain people's man. By Beelze
bub!" he added (for he had very odd fashions of swear
ing), "I'm glad to bring you two gentlemen together.
You both travel the honest track. You'll make a team/'

Mr. Vane and Mr. Sharp shook hands respectfully, and
said what pleasant things they could think of. Our mem
ber noted with some surprise that his famous and puis
sant visitor had a singularly soft., ingratiating, obsequious,

116

nay, even sycophantic utterance, and that his manner was
not only deferential, but slightly anxious and nervous
and embarrassed, as if he were a needy tradesman eager
to propitiate a difficult customer. Moreover, he was
unctuously and little less than stickily profuse in compli
ments, pouring them forth with a liberality which re
minded one of oil dripping from a castor-bean press.
He repeated over and over such lubricating common
places as, "I thank you truly, Mr. Vane. You are really
much too kind. You do me too high an honor. This
from you, my dear sir, is more than I deserve. I am de
lighted to have the pleasure of your acquaintance. I
hope to learn statesmanship from you, sir. I trust that
you will find me a zealous scholar. We have all been, as
it were, waiting for you. O, thank you kindly!" when a
seat was urged upon him. "You are really too urbane
and thoughtful. I thank you heartily."

At last, emerging with difficulty from a wilderness of
bowings and scrapings, they all three got settled creakily
on such unstable chairs as the dingy parlor afforded. Mr.
Dorman now opened his dry, blackened, baked lips, and
took the lead in the conversation.

"Just in Washington, Vane. I came on about my little
job, and I thought I'd drop in to see how you found
yourself; and as I was strolling along I met Friend
Sharp."

Here he glanced at that worthy person, who was there
by driven to nod and smile in confirmation of the tale,
although the fact was that Dorman had looked him up
at his residence and besought him eagerly to call on Vane.

"And it's a lucky circumstance, I think," continued
Darius, with one of his unpleasing smiles, a grimace
which seemed to express suffering rather than joy, as

117

though he had sat down upon an unhealed burn. "You
see, Friend Sharp is one of the oldest sailors in this ship
of state, and knows all the ropes, and the way to the
caboose, and everything."

"O, Mr. Dorman! you do me too much honor!*' put
in Mr. Sharp, with a meek, uneasy air. "I scarcely know
a rope, and know nothing about the caboose. You are
really too obliging. But you mean a compliment, and I
thank you kindly."

"I must have my little joke," winked Darius. "Well,
at any rate, Friend Sharp is a man who knows how to
keep out of traps and to show others how to steer clear
of them. Now you, Vane, have got a great measure on
your mind and conscience. It's a great and good meas
ure; there's no use in disputing it. The only question is,
whether it is best to push it now, or wait awhile. Will
hurrying it up do good or do harm? Mr. Simon Sharp
is just the person to tell you."

"Well, gentlemen," said Vane, with an elevating sense
of making a revelation, while the truth was that Sharp
already knew all about his proposed bill "well, gentle
men, I want to abolish the franking privilege."

The member from the old Whetstone State bowed,
stretched out one of his smiles into an adulatory grin,
and whispered in his greasiest voice, "Certainly, Mr.
Vane, certainly!"

"You agree with me!" rejoiced Honest John. "Well,
I'm glad of securing one leading voice in the House."

"In principle in principle," Mr. Sharp continued to
grin; "yes, in principle I entirely agree with you. You
have suggested a measure which touches my conscience,
and I need not say that I thank you kindly. You will
find many sympathizers with your idea in Congress, sir.

118

All honest, fair-minded, intelligent, and patriotic mem
bers long to do away with that expensive nuisance which
so corrupts our national morality and overloads our mail-
bags. The trouble is that the fellows who want a re
election " And here the good soul shook his venerable
head sadly over the character of the fellows who wanted
a re-election.

"But ain't there enough popular men and sound pa
triots to carry it, in spite of those chaps?*' asked Vane,
anxiously.

"You see, there are so many who want a re-election!"
explained Mr. Sharp, gently. "In fact, almost everybody
gets around to that state of mind after two years."

"Do you mean to say that all Congressmen think of
is how to get another term?" exclaimed Honest John,
rather indignant at the insinuation.

"No, no, by no means!" implored the Whetstone State
representative. "Pray don't understand me as even sug
gesting such a calumny. They think of many other
things," he added, remembering certain objects of gen
eral interest which he did not choose to mention; "but
this particular measure, you see the stoppage of elec
tioneering documents, etc. touches every man's chances
in the end."

"I see it does," grumbled our upright and brave mem
ber. "But what has that got to do with a fellow's duty?"

This allusion to duty may not have seemed germane
or important to Mr. Sharp; at all events he did not give
himself the trouble to oil it with any commentaries.

"Horace Greeley worked at this abuse for years," he
pursued. "Horace was an honest politician and a very
potent editor. He did his best, and he failed."

119

"And you mean to say that a man who isn't a shaving
to Horace Greeley won't succeed any better than he did,"
inferred John Vane, with a lowliness which shows that
he had some sense.

"I don't mean to say that you are only a shaving to
Mr. Greeley," responded Mr. Sharp, politely. "By no
means, sir. On the contrary, you quite remind me of
Mr. Greeley," he added, running his eyes over Vane's
cherubic face and portly figure. "He was not so well-
favored a man as you, sir; but still you remind me of
him, remind me very agreeably. Both self-made men,
also; I say it with profound respect." He bowed here,
and indeed he kept bowing all the while, like an earthen
ware mandarin. "And both honest, known to the world
as such, eminent for it!" he emphasized, with a grin
which could have bitten a quarter out of a mince-pie.
"Ah, well, sir! so much the worse!" he resumed. "An
honest man can't do away with the franking privilege.
A rogue might, for he would offer something in place
of it, and so, perhaps, carry his point by a sort of bar
gain. No, Mr. Vane; you must really excuse me for con
tradicting your honorable hopes, but a gentleman of your
character can't repeal the franking privilege, at least
not for years to come. That is my sorrowful, but candid
belief."

John Vane stared at Mr. Simon Sharp with wonder
and dismay. The venerable man had begun all right on
this matter, and then in the most rational and natural
manner, had ended all wrong. Was this the way that
people learned to reason by dint of sitting for several
terms in Congress?

"If you could only become useful, generally useful,
you understand, you might try your bill with some

120

chance of success/' resumed Mr. Sharp, after some mo
ments of meditation. "A man who is known to be use
ful," and he laid a very strong emphasis on the word,
"such a man can propose almost anything, and car
ry well, carry something/*

"Well, how can I get to be useful?" inquired the zeal
ous neophyte from Slowburgh.

"I'll tell you," smiled the veteran, at the same time
hitching his chair forward confidentially, as if being use
ful \vere a sort of patent-right or other precious secret,
not to be communicated to the public.

121

act

^2!. A.SUS/ 1I5T- JfL T JSL y*Y JL

legislation is the
great field for what I call Congressional usefulness,"
pursued Mr. Sharp, again bringing down a violent em
phasis on the word, as if he were trying to drive it into
his listener's head.

"Ah! is it?" stared John Vane. "That's news to me.
I thought general legislation was the big thing, re
form, foreign relations, sectional questions, constitutional
points, and so on; I thought those were the diggings to
get a reputation out of/*

"All exploded, my dear sir!" answered Mr. Sharp. "All
gone out with Calhoun and Webster, or at the latest,
with Lincoln and Stanton. All dead issues, as dead as
the war. Special legislation or, as some people prefer
to call it, finance is the sum and substance of Con
gressional business in our day. It is the great field, and
it pays for the working. It pays every way. Your vote
helps people, and they are grateful and help you. Your
vote brings something to pass, and the public sees that
it does, and respects you. Work into finance, Mr. Vane,"
exhorted Mr. Sharp, gently moving his hand in a spiral,
as if to signify the insinuation of a corkscrew, "work
slow - ly into finance so to call it. Take up some

123

great national enterprise, and engineer it through. Get
your name associated with a navigation scheme, or a
railroad scheme, to advance commerce, you understand,
or to move the crops." And as he alluded to these noble
purposes, his voice became little less than reverential.
"The millions yet unborn you understand," here he
seemed to be suggesting hints for a speech in advocacy
of said scheme, "millions yet unborn will have reason
to remember you. Capital will become your friend. And
capital ah, Mr. Vane, there's a word! My very blood
curdles when I think of the power and majesty of capital.
This land, sir, this whole gigantic Republic, with its pop
ulation of forty millions, its incomparably productive
and energetic industry, and its vast network of contin
ental communications, is the servant, and I had almost
said the creature, of capital. Capital guides it by its
wisdom and sustains it by its beneficence. Capital is to
be, and already is, its ruler. Make capital your friend.
Do something for it, and secure its gratitude. Link your
fortunes and your name with some gigantic financial en
terprise. Then, when you have won the reputation of
advancing the industrial interests of the country, and
gathered around you hosts of admirers and friends, you
can return to your pet measure. Now, there is my advice
the advice of an old hand. Doesn't it strike you as
worth considering? My maxim, as you see, is slow and
sure. I also have my little reform at heart, but I keep
it waiting until I can get strong enough to push it, and
meantime I strengthen myself by helping other people.
Never mind now what that reform is," he added, noting
a gleam of inquiry in Vane's eye; "you will hear of it
some day. Let us come to the immediate and the prac
tical. While I make my humble little project bide its
time, I am busy with a scheme which combines capital

124

and industry, a scheme of national importance and mag
nitude. I don't mind mentioning it to you. It is the
great Subfluvial Tunnel Road, meant to run through our
country from north to south, under the Mississippi River,
uniting Lake Superior with the Gulf of Mexico. It is a
gigantic idea: you must admit it. Of course, the business
minutiae and prospects of it are beyond me," he conceded,
with an air of innocence and simplicity which seemed to
relieve him of all responsibility as to those points. "There
I have to trust to the judgment of business men. But
where my information fails, Mr. Dorman here can fill the
gap. Dorman, suppose you let our friend into this if he
wants to come in/'

John Vane, being quite beyond his honest depth by
this time, had nothing to say to the Great Subfluvial
either in condemnation or praise, but merely stared in
expectant silence.

"It is the job I gave you a hint about in Slowburgh,"
began Darius Dorman, turning upon his member a pair
of sombre, lurid, smoky eyes, which were at once utterly
unearthly and utterly worldly. "We have just got it well
under way."

"What! stock taken?" exclaimed Vane, amazed that he
had not heard of such a huge financial success.

Darius smiled., as a slave-trader might smile upon a
stalwart, unsuspicious negro who should express a cur
iosity to see the interior of his schooner.

"The subscription is to be started by the government,"
he proceeded. "That is, the government will loan the
capital necessary to build the tunnel, and then secure
itself by a mortgage on the same. No particular risk, you
see, to capitalists, especially as they will get the first issue
of stock cheap, and won't be called on to pay in a heavy
percentage. What they don't want to keep they can sell

125

to the outside public, the raft of small investors. Now,
bankers and financiers won't neglect such a chance as
that; they will pile in as fast and as plenty as need be.
With a government loan to start on, the stock is sure to
be floated and the thing finished; and after that is done,
why, it will go on pretty much as railroads do, grad
ually increase its business, and in the end pay well, like
railroads."

Just here there was a malicious twinkle in his char
coal-pits of eyes, as though he were thinking of the num
berless widows and orphans and other unprotected crea
tures whose little all had gone into railroads without ever
bringing out a dividend. At the same time, he glanced
suddenly at his grimy hands and rubbed them uneasily
against each other, as if he would have been glad to get
them clean for once in his existence, or as if the macula-
tions on them itched and scalded quite intolerably.

"O, there's nothing unusual or extra smart about the en
terprise!" he resumed, perhaps detecting in Honest John
Vane's countenance a gleam of suspicion. "It's about the
way railroads in general are got up, except the one notion
of a government loan to start the thing. That is new and
patented. Don't mention that for the Devil's sake!" he
implored, with an outburst of his characteristically ec
centric profanity. "Keep as dark as hell about the whole
thing. All we want of you is to bear the job in mind, and
when the House comes to the question of the loan, give
us your voice and vote."

"It will be a grand thing for the country," put in Mr.
Sharp, seeing that Vane pondered.

"O, magnificent!" exclaimed Dorman. "Give us another
New York at New Orleans. Double the value of land in
the Mississippi Valley."

126

"Unite the North and South," continued Sharp. "Close
up the bloody chasm. Bind together the national unity
in chains of cast-iron."

"Pour the wild rice of Green Bay upon the dinner-
tables of our working-men," responded Dorman.

"Bring the Menomonie Indians within easy reach of
Christian missionaries," was Sharp's next word in this
litany.

"Providing the whole tribe hasn't already got to the
happy hunting-grounds," suggested Dorman.

The Whetstone statesman glanced at the business man,
and the business man glanced at the Whetstone states
man. Apparently (only John Vane did not perceive it)
the two came very near laughing in each other's faces.

"Besides, it will pay well, at least to first investors,"
resumed Dorman.

"Yes, I should think it might pay them well," answered
John Vane, with just a suspicion of satire in his tone.

"If you should ever care to invest, by the way," sug
gested the business man, as though that were a thing
which he had just thought of, and which would of course
not influence his representative's decision, "if you should
ever fancy putting something of your own in, we can
promise you a sure return for it. You shall have your
pick, stock at the opening figure, corner lots cheap
around the stations, something paying and safe, you
know, something salable if you don't want it."

"Well, I'll think of it," nodded Vane, who had already
made up his honest mind to have nothing to do with the
Great Subfluvial, judging it to be a scheme for swindling
the government and the general public.

"Do so," begged Mr. Simon Sharp, his broad array of
yellow teeth showing in a manner which vaguely re-

127

minded one of the phrase, "dead men's bones and all
uncleanness." The member from the old Whetstone State
seemed at the moment to be as full of teeth as ever a
freshly opened tomb was of skeletons. It was an error
in him to make exhibition of those ravening tushes and
grinders; they neutralized abominably the expression of
integrity and piety which gleamed from the Puritanic
lacker of his venerable mug. "Do, Mr. Vane/' he con
tinued, "give the project your intelligent consideration,
and see if it is not worthy of your highly reputable and
valuable support. And now, sir, I am compelled, very
much against my wishes, to bid you a good morning.
Delighted to have made your acquaintance, and to wel
come you as a brother Congressman. Don't go to the
door with me, don't! You are altogether too urbane. I
thank you kindly."

1SS

86;

JSfe=^aJL Jai laL JaL^Iii Mm" x <c5 - ~J5L"

-, able old fellow,
that Sharp/' observed Dorman, as soon as the Whetstone
patriot had fairly bowed and smirked himself out of the
house. "Glad he happened to drop in on you while I
was here."

"See here, Darius !" broke out Vane, still Honest John
Vane, proud of his noble sobriquet and resolved to hold
fast to it. "I'm not going to go for a bill merely because
there's money in it, and some of that money offers to
come my way. That ain't my style."

"I know it isn't/' conceded Dorman, bowing humbly
to this tempest of integrity and honorable self-esteem,
probably for the sake of weathering it sooner.

"Then what do you offer me cheap stock for, and corn
er lots at a nominal figger, and all that sort of thing, to
get me to vote your loan? Don't you know and don't I
know that you are trying to bribe me?"

"You take your risk, don't you?" argued the man of
affairs. "I don't offer you money, but merely a business
risk."

"What risk is there when the government is to con
struct the road, and to give it such a credit that the
stock can't help selling? You might as well talk about

129

the risk of taking United States bonds at half the market
value. You can't fool me that way, old boy. I'm a busi
ness man myself. I see as plainly as you do that the
Great Subfluvial is to be built at the expense of the
Treasury for the benefit of directors and officers and boss
stockholders, who will take the shares at fifty, say, and
sell them out at par, and then leave the whole thing on
the hands of the small investors and Uncle Sam. That's
what you fellows mean to do, and want me to help you
do. I don't see it."

"John Vane, if you are really Honest John Vane, you'll
allow that one good turn deserves another," insinuated
Dorman.

"I know you think you put me here," replied Vane,
who already began to feel the oats on which Congress
men feed, and to attribute to his own mettle his advance
ment from the position of "wheel-horse" to that of "lead
er." "You did say a word in season for me at the caucus:
I own it. But proposing is one thing, and getting the
nomination is another, and carrying the election is a third.
Could you have shoved through any other man? Why
didn't you try it? You saw what horse could win the
race, and you bet on it. It was the name of Honest John
Vane, the man of the plain people, the self-made
man, that's what took the caucus and the ballot-boxes.
And now you want me to throw all those claims to re
spect and power overboard; want me to stop being honest
and to tax the plain people uselessly; want me to go back
on myself and my best friends; want me to follow in
Bummer's dirty trail. Suppose I should do it? Why, I
should end like Bummer; I should be laid on the shelf.
O, I'm not ungrateful for what you did toward the nom
ination! I'll do anything in reason for you, old boy,
get you a collectorship or postmastership, anything that'll

130

bear telling of. But I won't help plunder the Treasury
of forty millions, and the stock-buying public of twice
as much more, merely to give you a hundred thousand
and myself five thousand. I tell you squarely, and you
may as well understand it first as last, that I won't go
into your lobbying."

"Why, this is the way everything works here/' the lob
byist ( for such he was ) at last asserted in his desperation.
"Bills of this sort slide through every year. Some are
upset, but who upsets them? Fellows who haven't been
retained, or who have rival bills to push. I tell you,
John Vane, that more than half your brother patriots in
the Capital do something in this line. The main work
of Congress is done out of sight, like that of a mole, or
by Beezlebub! any other underground creature. Making
such laws as are needed, and voting such appropriations
as the departments demand,, wouldn't worry through a
ten day's session. The real business of your legislators
is running party politics, clearing scores with your fugle
men, protecting vested interests which can pay for it,
voting relief bills for a percentage on the relief, and sub
sidizing great schemes for a share of the subsidy. A
good Congressman of the present day is the silent part
ner of every job that he supports. That's what I meant
by financial legislation when I urged you to go into it.
Don't be an old-fashioned dog-in-the-manger, John Vane.
Go with the crowd and humor the crowd; let others have
their fodder, and bite in yourself. Look at the rafts of
patriot statesmen who drive their carriages and keep
open house. Do you suppose they do it off their salaries?
Then why can't you do it off your salary, instead of hud
dling into these two little rooms and traveling by horse-
car? Is it because they know how to make money go
further than you do? No, sir! They take their little stock

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in a good bill, and then put it through. It's the common
thing in Washington, and it's got to be the correct thing.
And you can't change it. There's a boiler inside this boat
which will make the wheels turn round, no matter who
tries to hold 'em. As long as there is special legislation,
there will be money to be made by it, and legislators
will take their share. When a rich financier or monopolist
comes to a poor M. C., and whispers to him, I want a
chance to pocket a million, is the M. C. to say, Pocket it,
and be sure not to give me any? Will he, as your human
nature averages, will he say it? No, sir! he says, Let me
have a percentage; and I assert that he's right. It's the
natural working of humanity, under the circumstances.
The only thing I wonder at is, that Congressmen are con
tent with so little. Most of 'em ain't bold and hearty at
all. They are pusillanimously half honest. Come, Vane,
I want you to do well in the world of politics, and I want
you to begin by supporting the Great Subfluvial."

"Dorman, I have the greatest mind in the world to
expose you," was the almost heroic response of Honest
John.

"I should contradict and disapprove every word of
your exposure," laughed the unabashed lobbyist. "Do
you suppose Congress wants subsidy legislation ripped
open and exhibited to the public? Congress would be
lieve you and would appoint a committee of investiga
tion, and then would hush the matter up. Wait till you
have learned your business, and then call me a liar, if
you can."

And so the interview ended, with virtue still unshaken,
but vice undiscouraged. Darius Dorman was too familiar
with his evil trade and with the society in which it had
hitherto prospered, to despair of finally leading his repre
sentative up to the manger of corruption. He narrated

132

the substance of the above dialogue to the Honorable
Simon Sharp with spasmodic twinges of cheerless gayety
which resembled the "cracked and thin laughter heard
far down in Hell."

"It is ludicrous, I must confess, Mr. Dorman," sighed
the representative of the old Whetstone State, with a sad
shake of his venerable long head; "but painfully so. I'm
afraid that your friend won't come to much in Congress.
He won't be a practical statesman. No head for finance."

"Don't give way to despondency about him, my benev
olent creature," answered Darius, shaking all over with
his dolorous mirth, his very raiment, indeed, quivering
and undulating with it, so that it seemed as if there might
be a twitching tail inside his trousers. "I have looked
into the very bottom of John Vane's thimbleful of soul.
I know every sort and fashion of man that he will make
up into, under the scissoring of diverse circumstances.
John has no character of his own. He has had neither
the born twist nor the education to give him one. He is
a chameleon. He takes the color of the people about
him. If his constituents ever find him out, they won't
call him Honest John Vane, but Weathercock John. He
went straight in Slowburgh, because most folks in Slow-
burgh go straight. After he has been long enough in
Congress he will be like the mass of Congressmen. The
furnace of special legislation and the bellows of Wash
ington opinion will melt him over. Don't be anxious
about him; it is a mere matter of time. He is pious, I
grant; but so are you, Friend Sharp; so are lots more
who live by subsidy bills. It's of no use to be inside
religion when you are also inside politics, as politics now
go. Yes, it is of use; it varnishes the politics over nicely;
it makes the special legislation look decent. John will
be a great help to us, his reputation is so good. We must

133

keep going for him, and we shall finally fetch him. When
he finds that the majority take stock in bills, when he
fairly realizes that he must choose between failing as a
watchdog of the Treasury and succeeding as lapdog of
the lobby, he will go for the spoils solid, or at least vote
a split ticket. I'll bet on bringing him over; I'll bet my
eternal happiness on it!" he laughed, as though the article
in question were not much to risk.

"You are a very plain-spoken person, Mr. Dorman/'
observed the Honorable Sharp, pulling a decorously long
face. "Just a little well, let us say eccentric, in your
expressions," he added with his obsequious smile. "How
ever,, to come to the substance of what you tell me, I
must admit that it is encouraging. You really cheer me,
Mr. Dorman. I thank you kindly."

Well, we have described the first Washingtonian temp
tation which stole to the side and whispered in the ear
of Honest John Vane. Of course it was not the last; the
goblins of the Mammonite crew dropped in upon him
from week to week and almost from day to day; he could
hardly put out his hands without feeling the pocket of a
ring or corporation gaping to receive them. If he ac
cepted an invitation to a supper, he found that it was
given by some subsidy or relief bill. If a gentleman
offered him a cigar, he discovered that it was scented
with appropriations. If he helped a pretty woman into
a street car, she asked him to vote for her statue or her
father's claim.

The lobby proved to be every way more imposing and
potent than he had imagined it. True, some of its repre
sentatives were men whom it was easy for him to snub,
men of unwholesome skins, greasy garments, brutish
manners, filthy minds, and sickening conversation; men

134

who so reeked and drizzled with henbane tobacco and
cockatrice whiskey that a moderate drinker or smoker
would recoil from them as from a cesspool; men whose
stupid, shameless boastings of their briberies were
enough to warn away from them all but the very elect
of Satan. But there were other corruptionists whom he
could not steel himself to treat rudely. There were form
er members of Congress whose names had been trum
peted to him by fame in his youthful days; decayed
statesmen, who were now, indeed, nothing but unfra-
grant corpses, breeding all manner of moral vermin and
miasma, but who still had the speech of patriotism on
their lips and the power to argue speciously about the
"needs of the country/* There were dashing Brummels,
who seemed to him much finer gentlemen than himself,
asserting a high position in society, wearing fine raiment
elegantly, brilliant in conversation, gracious in manner,
and stately in port. There were soldiers of the late war,
bearing titles which made his civilian history appear
mean, and boasting of services which seemed to crown
them with a halo of patriotism.

Hardest of all for a novice in public affairs to face,
there were pundits in constitutional law and Congres
sional precedent, whose deluges of political lore over
flowed him like a river, and stranded him promptly on
lone islands of silence. Then there were highly salaried
and quick-witted agents of great business houses, which
he, as a business man, knew, respected, and perhaps
feared. Now and then, too, there was a woman,, auda
cious and clever and stylish and handsome, an Aspasia
who was willing to promise money, and able to redeem
her promises in beauty. Indeed, it sometimes seemed to
John Vane that the lobby was a cleverer and more for-

135

midable assemblage than either of those two chambers
which nominally gave laws to the nation. More and more
distinctly, as the session went on, he realized that his
honesty would have a hard fight of it, and that if he
succeeded in keeping it from being borne to the ground,
he would grandly deserve to wear his cherished sobri
quet.

136

short, Honest John Vane was so abundantly
tempted and harassed by the lobbyists and their Con
gressional allies, as to remind us of that hardly bested
saint whom we have all seen in ecclesiastical picture-
land, surrounded by greater and lesser goblins and gro
tesque manifestations of Satan.

Virtue was the harder for him to follow after, because
he perceived that the vicious were not only enviably
prosperous, but -walked in their evil ways undiscovered.
The skinny leanness of his own honest porte monnaie
was all the more obvious to him when he contrasted it
with the portly pocket-books of the slaves of the ring.
While he foresaw that it would be difficult for him to
bring the year around on his salary, there was Potiphar
of New Sodom taking in one hundred thousand dollars
for "putting through" a single bill. While his brilliant
Olympia was sitting solitary and sorrowful in her two
dingy rooms, plain Mrs. Job Poor, the wife of a member
who supported the iron interest, kept open house in a
freestone block, and rolled in her carriage. It seemed to
him at times that, if there was a city on earth where
integrity got all the kicks, and knavery all the half -pence,
that city was the capital of this model Republic.

137

Nevertheless, he held fast by his righteousness and
remained worthy of his reputation. Give a dog a bad
name and he will deserve it, says one of the wisest of
proverbs. It is equally true that if you give a dog a good
name, he will strive to deserve that. In these days, when
temptation sought to bow Vane into the dirt, it was a
greatly supporting circumstance to him that he had re
ceived the title of Honest. Now and then he was cheered
and strengthened by seeing himself eulogized in the
newspapers under this Catonian epithet. Occasionally,
too, the organ of a ring would boast ( falsely ) that honest
John Vane had decided to vote for its particular swindle,
a fact which showed that the name had become a
synonyme for respectability and was reckoned able to
carry weight. He was a better man for this honorable
"handle"; it had the elevating influence of a commission
as "an officer and a gentleman"; it inspired him to ex
emplify the motto, Noblesse oblige. In spite of recur
ring enticements, he struggled on through the session,
without letting his hands be soiled by the first dirty
dollar.

In the meantime, his dear Olympia had been a greater
trial and stumbling block to him than the lobby. Not
that she consciously meant to trip up his integrity; on
the contrary, she hardly gave a serious thought to it. Her
desire was that her husband should take the political
leadership which belonged to him, and, what was of
course much more important, should give her the fash
ionable eminence which belonged to her. She had early
discovered, to her amazement and disappointment and
vexation, that a Congressman was not necessarily a social
magnate in Washington, If he was rich or potent, he
was reverenced; if he was poor and uninfluential, he was
neglected: his mere office had little to do with the mat-

138

ter. There were members whom the legislative world
and the stylish world did not make obeisance to; and
of these members, her John, whom she had partly se
lected because of his supposed greatness, was one. She
soon found that the wives of Cabinet secretaries and of
senators and of the chiefs of the great committees re
garded her as their inferior. Many of them did not ask
her to their receptions, and only returned her calls by
sending cards. Spurred by her eager desire to commune
with the ultra genteel, she committed the imprudence
of attending one senatorial party without an invitation,
and was treated with such undisguised hauteur by the
hostess that she went bedridden with mortification for
three days.

Even her beauty, which had secured her so many uni
versity beaux in Slowburgh, seemed to have no charm
here. Few noted gentlemen called on her, and not many
of these called twice. Whenever by good luck she got
to a reception, there was no swarming of fascinated male
creatures about her, and she was free to pass the entire
evening on the arm of her husband. She had anticipated
romantic attentions from foreign secretaries, and perhaps
ambassadors; but at the end of the session she did not
know a single member of any one of the diplomatic
corps; the only alien individuals who came with music
to her windows were monkeys and their masters. For a
time this neglect was a puzzle to her, and personally a
most humiliating one. Her beauty and graces were so
obviously ineffective that she began to doubt whether
she possessed beauty or grace, and to feel in conse
quence that she was of no worth, and even contemptible.

Eventually, however, she obtained light on this sub
ject; she perceived that her husband was right in affirm
ing that everybody in Washington "had an axe to grind";

139

the natural result being, that gentlemen would not spend
their time in paying court to ladies whose male relatives
had no favors to confer. At first it was a dismaying dis
covery, and she very nearly wept with vexation over it,
and tried to despise the world for its sordid selfishness.
But before long, moved by her habitual reverence for
society, she drifted into a disposition to take it as she
found it, and would fain have won its homage by a show
of that wealth and power which it demanded. The first
step to this end, of course, was to get out of her com
monplace lodgings and ascend to a grander style of liv
ing.

"O, I do hate these dirty, poverty-stricken barracks!"
she moaned,, more bitterly than ever. "I see plainly that
we shall never be anybody in Washington as long as we
pen ourselves up in two little vile rooms. You ought to
take a house, John, and give receptions and dinners, for
the sake of your own career. You would get a great deal
more influence that way than by fussing over papers in
committees and making speeches."

Then followed the old, stale discussion over the ex
pense of such a route to glory, the husband ending with
his usual meek but firm declaration that he dared not
risk it. Thereupon Olympia cried harassingly for an hour
or more, and sulked in silence for a day or two. It
seemed as if some alien and naughty soul had migrated
into her since the engaged days when she rayed forth
graciousness and amiability. The broad fact is that, so
far as the masculine outsider can discover, most girls
have no character until marriage. Then for the first time
they enter openly upon the struggle for life, and then
the strong traits which have hitherto remained invisible
come out boldly, like certain chemical inks when exposed
to the fire.

140

The result of this severest of Olympia's many sulkings
was a compromise. John Vane held on in his frugal or
semi-frugal lodgings, but he allowed his wife to give
frequent dinners, and also evenings with ice-cream. But
such a lame, halt, and beggarly lot as appeared at these
cheap, cold-water festivities! It seemed as if the host
must have gone out deliberately into the highways and
hedges of political lif e and forced them to come in. There
were Congressmen who were just like John himself,
mere tyros and nobodies in the great world of statesman
ship, members of the little committees or of no commit
tee at all. There were members from carpetbagdom who
had not yet secured their seats,, and delegates from the
territories who looked as though they might represent
the Digger Indians. Occasionally there was a sharp wire
puller or a sturdy log-roller from Slowburgh, and more
rarely a respectable citizen of that place, who had come
on to stare around Washington. One evening Olympia
was nearly driven into hysterics of mortification by dis
covering that her husband had brought in a Mormon.
She treated the venerable representative from Utah as
she had herself been treated at Senator Knickerbocker's,
and subsquently informed Honest John several dozen
times that he had ruined their position in society.

"I thought the old fellow would be a curiosity and
amuse you/' pleaded the husband. "You are always say
ing you want amusement/'

"Not that kind," tossed Olympia, utterly out of patience
with his stupidity, and thinking that by this time he
ought to have comprehended her better. "Low people
may amuse you, and I know they do. It is really one of
the great faults of your character, John. But to me they
are simply strange and odious bores. Can't you under
stand, once for all, that I want such amusements as other

141

ladies want, good society and genteel surroundings
and and nice things?"

"O, yes; and you want to dine with the British Am
bassador, and ride in a coach with liveries," grumbled
John, restive under this pestering, because he was yet
sore with preceding ones.

"Well, what woman in Washington doesn't?" retorted
Olympia, justifying herself in her own eyes with lament
able facility.

"I suppose you don't think there's anything fine in
having an honest man who does his duty and nothing
but his duty/* groaned Vane, referring with pardonable
pride to himself, but fretting under the knowledge that
his wife did not share that pride.

"O, there are so many honest people," sniffed Olympia,
eager to "take him down." "They are as common as
chips."

"Not in Washington," returned this unappreciated
Aristides, with a bitterness which was only in part pa
triotic.

Such little tiffs as this, I regret to avow, soon became
frequent. Olympia, having discovered that potentiality
in politics was necessary as a basis for social eminence,
began to interest herself disagreeably in her husband's
Congressional doings, and to rub peppery remarks into
him concerning his obligation to be eloquent, able, man
aging, and, in short, successful. She informed herself as
to what committees were the important ones, and de
manded of him why he was not on any of them.

"Because I am a young member, I suppose," answered
John, a little sulkily; for the fact in itself was an irritating
one, let alone being "talked to" about it.

"But here you are on the Committee for Revolutionary

142

Pensions," persisted the ambitious lady. "It is almost an
insult. There are only three or four Revolutionary pen
sioners left. Of course there is nothing to do."

"Well, we do nothing/' granted John, ungraciously.
"Somebody must do it.**

"You ought to try to get on the Committee of Ways
and Means, Mrs. Bulh'on says," continued Olympia. ""That
is the great committee, she says. Why don't you?"

"Why don't I try to be President?" exclaimed Vane.
"I am trying, I am doing what work comes in my way as
thoroughly and honestly as I can. If I stay here long
enough, I suppose I shall get higher," continued the poor
catechised man, who really had in him some industry,
perseverance, and common sense, materials of char
acter which might in time be worked up into a fair law
giver.

"Why don't you push your bill about that that
privilege?" was the next question of this stateswoman.
"That would make a sensation."

"They smothered it in committee," confessed the hus
band. "What could I do after that?"

"There! now you see!" exclaimed Olympia. "You see
the need of being on the leading committees. If you had
been a member of that committee, you could have
stopped their smothering it/'

"No, I couldn't," contradicted John, naturally indig
nant at being blamed for everything, both what he did
and what others did. "If I had been on it, I should have
been a minority of one, and the bill would have been
smashed all the same. The fact is, that Congressmen in
general are determined to hold on to the franking privi
lege."

"Didn't I tell you?" cried Olympia, remembering that

143

she had once counselled him not to urge unpopular
measures, "didn't I tell you so before we were en
gaged, and ever so many times since? I told you to give
up that old thing and plan something that could pass.
O, I wish I was a man!"

Remembering that if she had been one, he should not
have fallen in love with her, Vane was tempted to reply,
"I second the motion." But he restrained himself, for he
had a magnanimous streak in him, and he was really
very fond of his wife.

144

these days, Olympia was both sore and prickly
with a consciousness of her husband's incapacity; she
was as uncomfortable and as discomforting as a porcu
pine might be whose quills should be sharp at both ends.

She was always comparing him disparagingly with
somebody, with that well-descended gentleman of the
old school, Senator Knickerbocker; or that opulent gen
tleman of a new school, Senator Ironman; with the
Speaker and the chairman of the Finance Committee, and
that elegant Potiphar who had taken the hundred thous
and dollar fee; with the noted orators who had the ear of
the House, such as General Bourn and General Splurge.

She still liked John in lonely moments; when they
were by themselves of an evening, she often clung to
him with a sense that it was sweet to be loved and pro
tected; but all day she wished that he were more re
spected than he was, and greater than he could be. At
times she had an idea, or perhaps I should say a feeling,
that he had palmed himself off on her by false pretences.
Had he not married her in the guise of a political giant,
and was he not an indisputable political dwarf? Other
men made great speeches which stormed the admiration
of Washington, or "engineered something through Con-

145

gress" which had the effect of putting their wives into
freestone mansions. Not so with her husband; he was
a nobody,, politically, socially, and financially; and it was
all his fault, too, for she wanted it different.

But, at last, and as if by a mere freak of fortune, a
beam of prosperity lighted her path. Senator Ironman,
who was worth two millions at least, encountered her
by chance at a reception, paid her some flattering atten
tions, called upon her a few days later, and cajoled his
wife into calling. Glad and proud indeed was Olympia
over the acquisition of this patrician intimacy, the pass
to all the selectest dress circles and most exclusive private
boxes of that complex theatre, the social life of Wash
ington. Finally her beauty had availed her somewhat;
it had brought her in an hour more that was of value
in her eyes than she had derived in many months from
her husband's public services and reputable name; and,
as beauty triumphant will do, it bloomed out with in
creased splendor.

John Vane thought that he had never seen his wife
so handsome as she was on the evening in which he took
her to Ironman's great party, the grandest crush of the
season. It was even very delightful to the honest, un
suspecting soul to note how the rich and arrogant sena
tor evidently admired her, and how much he walked
and waltzed with her. And, if Mr. Vane liked it well,
you may be sure that Mrs. Vane liked it better. She was
throbbingly happy, whether on the great man's arm in
the promenade, or on his shoulder in the dance. The
deep flush of her brunette cheeks and the liquid sparkle
of her dark eyes revealed a stronger agitation than had
possessed her for many a day. People stared at her a
good deal; they called her "a stunner," and thought her
a little venturesome; various gentlemen, who knew Iron-

146

man well, exchanged queer glances; certain ladies, who
were equally informed, gazed sidelong at Mrs. Ironman.
None of these disquieting circumstances, however, were
visible to our two innocents from Puritanic Slowburgh.
They passed an entirely delightful evening, and then
walked economically but contentedly home, telling each
other how nice it had all been.

Thenceforward Mrs. Vane led a cheerier life of it. She
was invited everywhere, and Mr. Ironman was always
delightfully attentive, and consequently other people
paid court. She no longer found the Washington recep
tions unsocial, heartless, and stupid, mere elbowings
of selfish people who either did not know each other, or
only wanted to use each other, the dreariest social
gatherings perhaps that ever gas-light shone upon. The
favor of the rich senator and of his adherents and para
sites irradiated these doleful caucuses to her eyes with
interest and gayety. Moreover, Mr. Ironman did not re
strict his courtesies to occasions of festivity. His carriage
(not his wife's, but his own special turnout) was fre
quently seen at Vane's humble door. He took Olympia
in it all over the surrounding landscapes, to the reservoir
hill back of Georgetown, to the soldiers' cemetery at
Arlington, and to other similarly inspiring eminences
whence one can see a great ways, though not into the
future. Furthermore he gallanted her to the Capitol, to
the Smithsonian, to the theatre, and to concerts. Like
wise he sent her bouquets, and after a time finer presents.
In fact, his assiduity gradually verged into such an ap
pearance of courtship that there would have been talk
about it, if Washington society had not been charitable
even beyond Christianity in its judgments, and also ab
sorbingly intent upon affairs which were more profitable
than gossip.

147

It was, however, a perilous business for Olyrnpia, this
daily communion with Ironman. The senator was one of
those infrequent and yet discoverable statesmen who
value distinction among men mainly because it helps
them to captivate women. Although he was, to speak
with considerate vagueness, not under forty, he had that
restless passion for "conquests" which we scarcely pardon
in the novice of twenty, eager to secure acknowledgments
of the puissance of his individuality, or, in other words,
to show that he is "irresistible." There was not a session
during which his proud, calm, mature Juno of a wif e did
not have occasion to wonder what sort of common mortal
her Jove would run after next. This patient or indiffer
ent lady, by the way, had taken very kindly to Olympia,
considering her a young person whom it would be re
spectable for Ironman to drive about with, and who
would keep him from making himself ridiculous by send
ing bouquets to treasury girls.

But absurd as the senator was in the eyes of his spouse,
he could not seem absurd to Mrs. Vane, at least not im
mediately. His very rage for gallantry made him attrac
tive to a woman who knew by experience the sweetness
of flirtation, and who, for months past, had been confined
to very short browsings of it. As for his shining state on
the alps of society, and the entirely solvent, redeemable,
coinable wreaths and vapors of opulence which hung
about him, not only were they circumstances such as she
had always looked up to with admiration, but they
seemed more dazzling than ever, viewed through the
atmosphere of Washington. It is true that this wealth
was mainly the result of special enactments, not bene
ficial to the masses; that the rich statesman had enor
mously increased his riches by operations which he had
himself helped to legalize; and that he had sometimes

148

voted for a brother patriot's pet measure in consideration
of a similar service rendered to his own. But Olympia
did not concede much respect to political disinterested
ness; she had had a surfeit of that poorly paying virtue
in her own cheap and dingy home. Moreover, Ironman
had always been so prosperous that he could afford to
despise the direct lucre of the lobby, and thus had de
served, in the opinion of a closely sheared^ patient pub
lic, the repute of being a singularly upright lawgiver.

Nor was this the end of his enchantments; he possessed
talismans of a more personal nature. He was not so plain
a man but that, by dint of careful grooming and fine
caparisons, he could pass for handsome. True, he was
too lean, too hollow in the chest, too narrow in the
shoulders, and too knobby in the arms and legs, to in
spire the most realistic sculptor with a desire to per
petuate his model in marble, except for the bare emolu
ments of the job. But like many tall and long-limbed
men, he was graceful when under way, and had a special
ly good gait in dancing. As for the shiny circle on the
top of his blonde head, it, at first sight, appeared a de
cided disadvantage. To conceal it he bowed rarely and
at a very obtuse angle, which caused unobservant and
unreflecting people to pronounce him haughty, if not dis
courteous. But, on the other hand, it led him to carry
himself with erectness, and thus gave him a port which
was generally admitted to be distingue. His long, aqui
line, pinkish face had an expression akin to the immortal
perplexity of Lord Dundreary, but for that very reason,
perhaps,, was considered patrician by numerous Wash
ington ladies. On the whole, he was a cavalier whose
proffered arm might well thrill an ambitious woman's
heart with pride.

149

Such was the partially respectable statesman and al
most entirely ludicrous man who lifted the Vanes into
the highest circles of the society of our capital. As we
have said, his favor was a perilous boon to Olympia, con
sidering her breeding and aspirations. Even as a girl,
even while living thriftily in staid Slowburgh, she had
been eager after pomps and prodigalities. In Washing
ton, she had become still more demoralized, if we may
apply that ugly epithet to a longing for finery and ad
miration, a longing so common among our "guardian
angels." The splendors of women whose husbands had
got fortunes by engineering schemes through Congress
had completely dazzled her imagination and made her
mad with envy.

It would seem that special legislation and its attendant
snares of bribery were set for the downfall, not only of
our Federal heads in Congress, but also of their Eves.

150

JBB 'BMH' L , \ t ''JLLjJjj [jSj. Lj-'a}

good fortune the intimacy between Senator
Iromnan and Olympia had budded so late in the session
that it did not have time to ripen into such bloom as
would irresistibly attract the eye of scandal.

John Vane went home quite content with his wife, and
she rather more than content with herself. A diversified
existence Delectable Mountains mingled with Vales
of Tears awaited their feet in Slowburgh. It was de
lightful to our member to have his praises sung night
and morning by the enamoured troubadours of the party
journals, and to receive salaams, which were obviously
tokens of respect for his proved uprightness, from men
of acknowledged position and character, men who
had not previously deigned to know him, or had blandly
kept him at a distance. On the other hand, it was dis
agreeable to listen to the grumblings of unrewarded wire
pullers of low degree,, and to feel obliged to pacify them
by dint of promises, apologies, and wheedlings, which
now for the first time seemed to him demeaning.

As for Olympia, she could at last enjoy a consciousness
of peculiar distinction; for, whereas in Washington she
had been only one of many Congresswomen, she was the
sole and solitary one extant in Slowburgh, a fact which

151

gave her preeminence among her acquaintance. Unfor
tunately, it could not exalt her to the social zenith of
Saltonstall Avenue, where political notoriety had long
heen considered a disqualification rather than an intro
duction, owing to its frequent connection with such low
"jobbers" as Mr. James Bummer. Furthermore there was
a scant supply in the family locker of money. During
Vane's absence the refrigerator business had not done
well; a costly patent in the same had proved unremun-
erative; the dividends were pitifully meagre. All the
summer was spent in economizing at the maternal board
ing-house or at a cheap resort by the seaside. It was im
possible to meet the Ironmans at Saratoga, as Olympia
had confidently agreed to do. You can imagine her gen
eral discontent and how frequently her husband suffered
therefrom, and what a poorish season they had of it. But
the summer and fall wore away at last, and they returned
to Washington with a fair sense of satisfaction, though
indifferently furnished in pocket.

"We must live mighty close this winter," said Vane
to his wife, hoping she would take it well.

"Yes, we must keep house," replied Olympia, with
cheerful firmness. "This lodging and boarding is awfully
expensive, and you get nothing for your money, a
horrid table and vile furniture. It is just being swindled."

"I know it is being swindled," groaned John, gazing
over the edge of the frying-pan into the fire. "But it is
cheaper than housekeeping; everybody says so. We can't
afford a house any more than we can afford a pyramid."

"Yes, we can," insisted Olympia. And thereupon she
skipped lightly through a calculation of the cost of house
keeping: the rent would be so much, the food not much
more, the service about half as much; the result a clear
saving of many dollars a month.

152

It looked reasonable, when held up in that offhand
way; it seemed as if economy might evolve such a con
summation.

"But how about furniture, carpets, and so on?" reflect
ed Vane.

"Why, take a furnished house, you muddled creature."

"Ah! but that doubles the rent, or comes closer to
trebling it."

But still Olympia stuck to her project of saving; and
at last (oh, the perseverance of wives!) she conquered.
A house was taken, at first only for a month, for the rent
scared Vane, and he would not sign a longer lease.

"It seems to me that you are just trying to clean me
out," was his rather coarse response when Mrs. Vane
pleaded for tenure by the session. "If we were only mar
ried for the season, I could understand it. Can't you
remember that when my pocket is drained" ( dreaned, he
pronounces it) "yours is empty too?"

"And it seems to me that you are just trying to make
me miserable," was Olympiads illogical but telling retort.
"I don't want to be lectured, sir, as if I were in short
dresses."

Nor was she singularly unreasonable. At that very
time and perhaps in that very moment many other wives
of Congressmen were inciting their husbands to spend
more than their salaries. She had got into a lofty posi
tion, and she wanted to live conformably to it. That she
should thus live seemed so rational to her, that she could
not see how her husband could sanely object to it. As
for the lack of sufficient income for the purpose, that
surely was his lookout, and not hers. I ask triumphantly
how many feminine intellects can discover a flaw in this
logic?

153

Still, John showed no relenting; he had got his back
up, as the tom-cats put it to each other; he even looked
as though he did not care if she were miserable. So
Olympia resorted to argument once more, as feeble hu
manity does when it finds grumbling useless. She recited
the cases of half a dozen other members who had noth
ing but their salaries, yet took houses by the session; the
inference being that her member could do likewise, and
would if he were not a curmudgeon.

"Yes, and every one of them is head over heels in debt,
or drawing bribes from every ring in the lobby/* alleged
Vane. "Do you suppose that being ruined in a crowd
makes it any finer? Do you suppose that the drove of
porkers who rushed down steep places into the sea found
drowning any more comfortable because there were ten
thousand of them?"

"Porkers! I should like to know whom you apply that
name to," retorted Olympia, reddening with anger. "I
am your wife, sir, and a born lady."

"I was speaking of Congress," answered Vane, with a
smile, for he had grown tough under pecking. "Well, I
see that there is no use in arguing this matter. I have
signed the lease for one month, and I shall not change it."

So, on this occasion Olympia had to give in, although
it almost cost her her life, to use a common exaggeration.
But if a wife wants to punish her husband for his tyran
nies, there are always ways enough to do it, thank gra
cious. Mrs. Vane signalized her first week of housekeep
ing by giving a costly dinner, inviting Senator Ironman
thereto, and flirting with him so openly that hencefor
ward John carried a fresh prickle in his hymeneal crown
of roses. Other extravagances followed,, not all of them
indeed meant as castigations, for Olympia had a curious

154

felicity at spending money, and did it literally without
thinking. Instead of "saving on the table," as she had
promised to do and really meant to do, she so managed
matters as to make the family nourishment a synonyme
in Vane's mind for being eaten out of house and home.
Her cook did the marketing; for how could a born lady
do it? And this cook was a Washington colored sister,
a fact which speaks volumes to naturalists acquainted
with that primitive development of "help," a fact
which suggests waste, mousing relations, a hungry host
of visitors in the kitchen, and perhaps pilfering. Vane
asserted that, instead of feeding four people, as he had
expected to do, he fed nearer fourteen. Mrs. Vane re
plied, sometimes tearfully and sometimes pettishly, that
no mortal could rule "those creatures," and that no lady
ought to be expected to do it.

Two months, however, had passed away before this
state of things became obvious; the house being taken
for a second month because "it seemed absurd to break
up in such a hurry." Then,, all of a sudden, our member
found himself unable to pay his honest debts, or at least
a portion of them. It was a terrible thing to him; never
before had he been driven to send away a tradesman
uncontent; and it took all his Congressmanhood to keep
him from weeping over the novel humiliation. His dis
tress was heightened by a daybreak dialogue which he
chanced to overhear between his milkman and his butch
er's driver.

"Say! what kind o* folks is these Vanes, anyway?" de
manded the milkman, who was a Down-Easter settled
in the District.

"Dunno," responded the driver, who was a colored
man, and so cared for nobody and nothing.

155

"Waal, they've been gettin' milk from me for abeout
nine weeks, an* don't seem to allude to no keind o* peay,"
continued the milkman, with a piteous, inquiring accent.

"Specs likely/* admitted the negro, who would have
thought strange of anybody offering to pay for anything.

The unmeant satire of these remarks stung Vane like
a blister. All day he was saying to himself and of him
self: "Don't seem to allude to no keind o' peay. Specs
likely/' He could not stand it; he must confide his trou
bles and ask advice; he must get strength, wisdom, and
cheer out of somebody. The person whom he was finally
moved to open his bosom to was not a brother legislator,
but a person who was much scoffed at in Congress as a
poetical enthusiast and a political idealist, because he
was engaged in a noble plan for renovating a wofully
decayed branch of the government. Mr. Frank Caven
dish had met Vane in committee-rooms,, and the two had
been somewhat attracted to each other by their common
unpopularity, both being reckoned stumbling-blocks to
legislation as it is. To Cavendish our member now re
paired, saying to himself in a pathetically meek spirit,
that, if the man knew how to reform an entire system of
official business, he might, perhaps, be able to reform a
foolish Congressman.

"I don't want a loan," he explained, after he had stated
his case. "That wouldn't get me out of debt; it would
only change the debtor. Besides, it wouldn't stop the
sinking process. What I want is to learn how to live on
my salary, and still keep a decent position before the
world. It wouldn't be a matter of much account if it
was my case alone. But there are loads of us members
in the same fix, getting deeper and deeper in debt every
year, and seeing only one way out of it, special legis
lation, you know."

156

This last phrase he added with a ready, commonplace
wink which was habitual with him, and suggestive of
character. It revealed that, while he disapproved of the
briberies and corruptions of the lobby, he did not recoil
from them with the disgust of a morally refined soul, and
saw in them as much that was humorous as hideous.

"And that is sheer ruin," interjected Cavendish, with
the haste of one who puts out his hand to save a man
from falling.

"Yes, I suppose it is," responded Vane; remembering
that if he should take bribes and be exposed in it, he
would lose his prized and useful title of "honest."

"It is moral ruin to Congressmen and financial ruin
to the country/* continued Cavendish, wishing to impress
his lesson clearly on this evidently doughy nature.

"You're right/' admitted John, his conscience vitalized
and his intellect cleared by the remark. "If things go on
ten years as they are going now, the lobby will be the
real legislative power of the land. Well, to come back
to my own case, here I am living beyond my salary, and
not very blamable for it either. I am not extravagant in
my fancies/' he affirmed positively, and, as we know,
with truth; "and my wife don't want more than other
women generally do/' he added, giving Olympia what
credit he might, and perhaps more than was her due.
"But living here is really dear, you can't make it
otherwise. I've tried it, and you can't! I don't see but
one salvation for us. Do you think it would do to make
a move to raise our salaries?"

"Why not first make a move to lessen expenses?" sug
gested Cavendish.

"How?" asked Vane, thinking solely of giving up house
keeping and going into very cheap lodgings, and thinking

157

at the same time of the strenuous fight which Olympia
would wage against such a plan.

"Congress is largely to blame for the present enormous
cost of living," continued Cavendish. "It devised and it
still keeps in force the very laws which diminish by one
half the purchasing power of the dollar. Congressmen
vote to give themselves five thousand dollars a year, and
then vote to make that sum equivalent to only twenty-
five hundred. Of course you understand this matter," he
added, politely imputing to Vane more political economy
than was in him. "But allow me to explain myself, if only
to relieve my own feelings. Here you legislative gentle
men refuse to hasten the resumption of specie payments.
The consequence is, that you draw your salary in dollars
which are worth only about ninety cents apiece. Next,
and what is much more important, you keep up a system
of taxation which benefits certain producers enormously,
at an enormous expense to the collective body of con
sumers, the great majority of your constituents. Again,
and this too is very important, you lay these taxes less
on the luxuries of the rich than on the necessaries of the
poor. You have made tea and coffee free, they being
really luxuries and not needful to existence, although our
extravagant working classes use them abundantly. Mean
while you tax heavily all materials of labor and all arti
cles of common comfort. There is hardly a substance or
a tool which the American uses in his work but pays a
heavy duty. His coal and lumber, his food and the salt
which cures it, his clothing and so on, all are taxed. The
result is that labor must get high wages or starve.
The result to you is, that your apparently liberal salaries
are insufficient to support a moderate style of living."

"O I see you are a free-trader/' drawled John
Vane, his countenance falling.

158

"No, I am an advocate of a revenue tariff; of a system
of taxation which bears mainly on people in easy cir
cumstances; of a system like that of England and Bel
gium. The entire public income of those two countries
is paid by luxuries."

"O, I dare say you are right," sighed our member; "I
haven't looked into it much, I ain't on those commit"
tees,, you know, but I dare say you are right. How
ever, it can't be helped." And he shook his law-giving
head sadly. "If we should so much as whisper revenue
tariff, all the monopolists, all the vested interests, would
be after us. You don't know, perhaps, how sharp-eyed
and prompt and powerful those fellows are. They are
always on hand with their cash, and if you don't want
that you do want re-election. They are as greedy, and
I don't know but they are as strong, as the relief bill and
subsidy chaps. It's a mean thing to own up to, but Con
gress daren't fight 'em. This country, Mr. Cavendish,
this great Republic which brags so of its freedom, is
tyrannized over by a few thousand capitalists and job
bers. No sir, it's no sort of use; we can't have a revenue
tariff."

"Then there is nothing for an honest legislator to do
but to live on the tough steaks and cold hominy of cheap
boarding-houses," observed Cavendish.

"That's the only ticket," mumbled Vane; and the two
patriots parted in low spirits.

159

Honest John walked homeward, eschewing
the minute expense of the street-cars, he swore that he
would live like a pauper, and so keep his integrity.

But he reckoned without his host, meaning thereby
the partner of his bosom, who was certainly a host in
herself, particularly when it came to crying.

"Go back to boarding!" tearfully exclaimed Olympia,
who just then had a reception in view. "Then why did
you commence housekeeping? The idea of giving me
a house only to take it away again! You don't love me
as other men love their wives. You delight in plaguing
me." And so on, and over again, with much sobbing.

In a day or two she actually impressed Vane with a
feeling that, in wishing to "take her house from her/' he
was guilty of a purpose akin to robbery, and, of course,
entirely unworthy of a just husband. He had to concede
that, from one point of view, Olympia did not demand
overmuch; even to his business-like and arithmetical
imagination, five thousand dollars seemed a large in
come; even he could not yet believe it insufficient to
cover housekeeping. Partly because he was deluded by
this ante-tax idea, and partly because he was a compas
sionate man and loving husband, he deferred the humble

161

and lenten pilgrimage through boarding-house deserts
back to solvency,, and, of course, went more and more
laden with the bondage of debt.

At last, sad to relate, he began to admit to himself,
like so many other hardly bested men, that "something
or other must be done," meaning something which would
bring money, no matter how. One evening as he sat
alone in his parlor, now staring in dull discontent at the
shaky furniture for which he paid such a high rent, now
recalling the fact that Olympia was away at a reception
with that opulently dazzling Ironman, he once more
thought over his wilderness of troubles and tried to de
vise a way out of them. He was harassed, degraded, and
enfeebled by the daily urgency of debt. His matrimonial
happiness had been half wrecked by the mere lack of
filthy lucre. If he wanted to recover his wife's respect
and affection, he must positively provide her with gra
cious surroundings, and stop bullying her about expendi
tures. How could he get money, with honesty, or, alas!
without it?

While he was puzzling amid the brambles of this
wretched question, he was surprised by a visit from his
former friend and wire-puller., Darius Dorman. Vane
and Dorman had not seen much of each other since the
former had denounced the Great Subfluvial Tunnel as
little better than a trick for defrauding the government
and the public of small investors. The lobbyist had
judged that it would not be wise to "keep at" Honest
John, and had expended his time, breath, and funds on
members of a less Catonian type.

Meanwhile the bill had prospered as bills do which
"have money in them." Although Vane had voted against
it, the tunnel had obtained a charter from Congress and
likewise a loan of forty millions from the United States

162

Treasury, the same being only a dollar a head from every
inhabitant of this free country, including women, chil
dren, negroes, and Indians not taxed. Two or three times
as many more millions had come in from financiers who
saw forty per cent profit in an early purchase, and from
a simple public which believed that it could safely fol
low the lead of the wise men of the capital. Furthermore,
the directors and managers of the Great Subfluvial had
contrived what might be called a Sub-Tunnel for their
own peculiar emolument, which fulfilled its purpose ad
mirably. This was a most wonderful invention, and de
serves our intense study. It was a corporation inside of
the original corporation. Its ostensible object was the
construction of the Subfluvial, but its real object was the
division of the capital into profits. For instance, it built
a mile of tunnel at a cost of, say ten thousand dollars,
and then delivered the same to the outside company for
say fifty thousand dollars, and then shared the difference
of forty thousand dollars among its own stockholders. Of
course this was a better bargain for the inside company
than for the outside one; but all chance of quarrelling
between the two was evaded by a very effective device;
they had the same men for directors, or the same men's
partners.

O, it was a beautiful business idea, this Floating
Credit, or Syndicate, or whatever its inventors christened
it. It reminds one of that ingenious machine called the
Hen Persuader, which was so constructed that when
placed under a hen's nest, it would withdraw every egg
the moment it was laid, whereupon biddy would infer
that her sensations had deceived her with regard to the
fact of laying, and would immediately deposit another
egg, and so continue to do until she died of exhaustion.
In some respects, also, this internal corporation resem-

163

bled that hungry creature known as a tape-worm, which
devours a man's dinner as fast as he swallows it, and
leaves him hungrier than ever.

Of course the gentlemen who held shares in the Hen
Persuader did a profitable business, and filled their pri
vate wallets with golden eggs in abundance. But still
they were not quite content; the old fowl above them,
that is to say, Uncle Sam's eagle,, occasionally cackled
angrily; and it was extremely desirable to put a stop to
his alarming demand for chickens. Darius Dorman had
an anxious look on his crisped and smutted physiognomy
as he seated himself opposite his representative.

"Vane, we must have another lift, or let the whole
thing drop," he said abruptly.

"What! haven't you bled the treasury enough?" grum
bled Honest John, angrily contrasting his own shrunken
porte monnaie with the plethoric pocket-books and over
running safes of the great corporation.

"We want time," answered Dorman, really meaning
thereby that he wanted an eternity of it. "Here is this
Secretary of the Treasury making a raid on us. He asks
for interest on his loan. How in the name of all the
witches of Salem does he suppose the Subfluvial can pay
three millions of interest per year, in addition to meeting
its running expenses? We understood that the interest
was to wait until the termination of the loan, thirty years
from now."

"Pay it out of the principal," suggested Vane sulkily.
"Do as other roads do."

"But we want the principal for dividends. We can't
keep on selling stock, unless we show a dividend now
and then."

"Ain't there any profits?" asked Vane, with a keen look.

164

"Haven't your managers and inside passengers laid away
enough to spare a little for profits?"

Donnan had such a spasm that he fairly writhed in
his chair. It seemed as if every swindling dollar that he
had got out of the Hen Persuader were that moment
burning into his already cicatrized cuticle.

"O, they will fall in later," he smiled, recovering his
self possession. "They will come when the tunnel is clean
through, and has had time to make travel. But until
that time arrives we must have favor shown us. Give
us a lift, John, and we'll give you one."

Honest John Vane hesitated, querying whether he
should take one solitary step to meet temptation, and see
at least what it was like.

"Well," he at last said, in the surly tone of a man who
feels that he is on the verge of making a diabolically bad
bargain, "well, what do you want now?'*

165

very faint promise of aid which seemed
to exhale from Vane's question cheered up Donnan a
little.

There was a strange brightening in his dusky eyes,
followed by a momentary obscuration and haziness, as
though a few sparks had risen to their surface from some
heated abyss, and had gone out there in a trifle of smoke.
He started up and paced the room briskly for some sec
onds, meanwhile tightly clasping his dried-up, blackened
claws across his coat-skirts, perhaps to keep his long tail
from wagging too conspicuously inside his trousers,
that is supposing he possessed such an unearthly embel
lishment.

"I'll tell you what we want/* he at last chuckled, with
the air of a man who is about to utter a devilish good
joke. "We want, first, a bill to stop the collection of
interest until the loan falls due, when we will pay the
one hundred and thirty millions at once, if we can. Sec
ond, we want a bill to change the government lien from
a first to a second mortgage, so that we can issue a batch
of first-mortgage bonds and raise money for current ex
penses. That's all we want now, Vane, and I'm sure it's
moderate."

167

"O, ain't it, though?" grinned Honest John, half indig
nant and half amused at this impudent rapacity. "I'm
sure it's very kind of you not to ask Uncle Sam to throw
in the whole loan as a present. I dare say you might
get it."

<C O, we're not a bit greedy," Dorman continued to
chuckle. "Well, now, to go back to business, we must
have good men to help us. We want the very best. The
fellows who have pushed us through so far are mainly
such notorious deadbeats in point of character that they
would throw discredit on a recruiting agency. We want
a fresh lot, and a respectable lot. We want such fellows
as Christian and Faithful in the Senate, and you and
Greatheart and Hopeful in the House."

Honest John Vane pondered; he thought of his good
fame,, and then he thought of his debts; he thought of
his insufficient salary, and of the abounding millions of
the Great Subfluvial. Finally he came to the risky de
cision that he would just ask the way to the bottomless
pit, reserving for further consideration the question of
leaping into its seething corruption.

"How are you going to get us?" he inquired, in a
choked and almost inaudible voice, the voice of a man
who is up to his lips in a quicksand.

The eyes of the Mephistopheles of the lobby glowed
with a lurid excitement which bore an infernal resem
blance to joy. He had a detestable hope that at last he
was about to strike a bargain with his simple Faust.
There was more than the greed of lucre in his murky
countenance; there was seemingly a longing to buy up
honesty, character, and self-respect; there was eagerness
to purchase a soul.

'"We can make things just as pleasant as a financier
eould want," he answered, coming at once to the point

168

of remuneration. "You don't want stock in the Subfluvial,
of course. If you held shares in that and then gave it a
lift, the opposition lobby would bawl about it, and the
public might impute selfish motives. But we have got
up an inside machine, which is all the same with the
Subfluvial, and yet isn't the same. It works under a
separate charter, and yet has the same engineers. It
builds the tunnel, handles the capital once or twice, and
keeps what sticks to its fingers. It's a construction com
mittee, in short, which fixes its own compensation. It's
a sure, quiet, rich thing for dividends. I don't know a
safer or more profitable investment. We can let you into
that, and you can draw your hundred and fifty per cent
a year, and all the while be as snug as a bug in a rug.
Will you come inside the rug? Will you stand by the
great, sublime, beneficent, liberal Subfluvial? Say you
will, John! It's a noble national enterprise. Say you'll
see it out."

As Honest John Vane stared at his grimy tempter,
striving to decide whether he would accept or spurn that
tempter's degrading proffer, he had the air of a man who
is uncomfortably ill, and his appearance was matched
by his sensations. There was a woful sickness in his
heart; and, to use a common phrase more easily under
stood than explained, it struck to his stomach; and that
fleshly-minded organ, taking its own physical view of the
matter, electrified every nerve with the depressing thrills
of bodily indisposition. He was as ill at ease and as pale
as the unseaworthy landsman whom Neptune has just
begun to toss in his great blanket. Moreover, he felt
that he was pale; he knew that he did not present the
healthy countenance of stalwart innocence; and this
knowledge increased his discomposure, and made him
look fairly abject.

169

It would be impossible, short of reiterating all the cir
cumstances of our story, to give a complete idea of his
thoughts and emotions. But we must specify that he
sorrowfully blamed his wife for those follies of hers which
had driven him into debt; that he cursed the widespread
social extravagance which had made of that wife a piti
less, or at least an uncomprehending extortioner and
spendthrift; and that he cursed even more bitterly that
whole system of subsidies and special legislation which
was now drawing around him its gilded nets of bribery.
There were stinging reminiscences, too, of his worthy
glorying in the title of Honest; of his loud and sincere
promises to acclaiming fellow-citizens that he would
labor tirelessly at the task of congressional reform; of his
noble trust that he might establish a broad and perman
ent fame on the basis of official uprightness. All these
things went through him at once like a charge of small
shot. No wonder that his moral nature bled exhaustively,
and that he had the visage of a man stricken with mortal
wounds.

It must be observed, however, that his grief and com
punction were not of the highest character, such as would
doubtless accompany the downfall of a truly noble na
ture. There is a rabble in morals as well as in manners,
and to this spiritual mobocracy Vane belonged by birth.
The fibre of his soul was coarse, and it had never been
refined or purified by good breeding, and very likely it
was not capable of taking a finish. No such "self-made
man" was he as Abraham Lincoln, or many another who
has shed honor on lowly beginnings, and made the phrase
"self-made" dear to millions. On the contrary, he was
one of those whose mission it is to show the millions that
they are disposed to over-estimate the qualities implied
by this absurdly popular epithet. He had his good fruits;

170

but they sprang from feeble or selfish motives, and so
were not likely to bear abundantly. He did not prize
virtue for its own sake, but because the name of it had
brought him honor. In truth, his far-famed honesty had
thus far stood on a basis of decent egotism and respect
able vanity. When his self-conceit was sapped by debt
and by the sense of legislative failure, the superstructure
sagged, leaned, gaped in rifts, and was ready to sink
under the first deluge of temptation.

In the expression with which he looked at Dorman,
you could see how much his vanity was hurt. He had
a stare of dislike and anger which would have caused
a human being of ordinary sensibilities either to quit
the room or roll up his sleeves for a fight. Like many
another over-tempted person, he hated his tempter while
submitting to him, and because he submitted to him. His
soul, indeed, was in a confounding turmoil of contradic
tions, and did not work at all as the souls of accountable
creatures are meant to work. Had he retained full pres
ence of mind, he would have held back his concession
to wrong until he could make a bargain, and sell his soul
for at least what little it was worth. But his very first
words of sin were at once an apology for it and a con
fession that he was not in circumstances to dictate his
own price for it.

"Darius, I am awfully hard up," he said, with an abject
pathos which ought to have drawn a bonus from the most
griping and illiberal of the Lords of Hell.

But an utterance of weakness or suffering was the last
thing in the world which could draw generosity from the
nondescript sinner who had come to entice him. It may
be that Dorman was only a fiend in embryo, who was
still awaiting diabolical regeneration, and had not even

171

commenced his growth in the true infernal graces; but
if so, he was a chrysalis or tadpole of truly abominable
promise, whose evolution would be likely to fill all Ge
henna with gladness, and cause it to welcome his coming
with strewings of its most sulphurous palm-branches. No
doubt his anthropological experience had been an advan
tage to him; he had absorbed all the evil that he could
find in business, politics, and lobbying; he had developed
to the utmost the selfish, pitiless instincts of traffic and
chicane. All the law and the prophets that he knew were
comprised in the single Mammonite commandment, Thou
shalt buy cheap and sell dear.

The consequence was that he listened to John Vane's
avowal of bankruptcy without a throb of compassion.
Indeed, his only emotion on hearing that cry of a stumb
ling soul was a huckstering joy in the hope of getting a
good thing at a bargain. The cheaper the better, the
more of a trading triumph, and therefore the nobler.
Whoever has read the stories of those diabolical tempta
tions which were so common in the "ages of faith," knows
that Satan is anxious to purchase immortal spirits on the
shabbiest possible terms. The reason is plain: a beggarly
price not only "bears" the market, but throws contempt
on the <c Line of merchandise" traded for; it exposes to
the scorn of chaos the spiritual and, therefore, most per
fect work of the Creator.

172

possessed in full
measure the Luciferian humor of higgling.

Discovering that Vane was in financial extremities, he
inferred that he would "sell out at a low figure." He had
come empowered to offer five thousand dollars for the
respectability which lay in Honest John's character; but
he now decided that he would throw out only the bait
with which he was accustomed to angle for the ordinary
fry of Congressmen. If one thousand dollars' worth of
stock sufficed to land his fish, there would remain four
thousand dollars for himself, a very fair commission.

"You ought not to miss this chance, Vane," he said,
with the calmness of a horsedealer. "We will guarantee
you ten per cent, and it is pretty certain to pay fifty, and
may pay twice as much."

"Of course it will pay anything that you inside fellows
choose to make it pay," answered the Congressman, with
a bluntness which revealed his moral inflammation. He
was in the condition of a man who is having a tooth
pulled, and who cannot but desire to make a bite at his
dentist's fingers.

"Well, that's so,, of course," admitted Donnan, with
the smile of a trickster who decides to make a merit of

173

enforced frankness. "But it wouldn't do for us to cut the
profits too fat, you know. We can't divide up the whole
Subfluvial stock and government loan among the con
struction ring. We've got to draw a line somewhere.
Say a hundred per cent, now."

"Say so, if you like/' returned John Vane, sullenly,
meanwhile searching in vain for some pecuniary escape
from this bargain, so full of risk for his good name and
of humiliation to his vanity.

'Well, I say so; that's agreed on," winked Dorman.

There was a silence now which endured through sev
eral eternal seconds. The statesman who was for sale
and the lobbyist who wanted to buy him were both alike
unwilling to name a price, the former through shame
and the latter through niggardliness.

"There isn't much of this left," Dorman at last re
sumed. "Stands at one or two hundred per cent above
par. It's such a safe and paying thing that there's been
a loud call for it."

Vane made no response. He had an appearance even
of not listening to the agent of the abysses of corruption.
The truth is that he was beginning to recover his self-
possession, and with it his faculty for dickering.

"I could let you have five hundred of it, though," con
tinued the lobbyist, still bent upon getting his soul for
a song.

"Do you mean to insult me?" demanded Vane, with
a glare which might mean either huckstering anger at the
meanness of the bribe or virtuous indignation at being
offered a bribe at all.

"Say a thousand, then," added Dorman, with a spas
modic start, as if the offer had been jerked out of him by
red-hot pincers, or as if the breath in which he uttered

174

it had been a scalding steam of brimstone. "Senators
Christian and Faithful took a thousand each, and were
glad to get it. Let me see; we've had to go as high as
that on some of the House fellows, too, such men as
Greatheart and Hopeful, for instance. Well, I ought not
to mention names."

"Why, those are our biggest figure-heads!" Vane al
most shouted, springing up and pacing the room in
amazement.

"Of course they are," grinned Dorman. "The very high
est sign-boards in Congress, the saints and the advocates
of reform, and the watch-dogs of the Treasury! There
are no men of better reputation inside politics/'

"I wouldn't have thought it of them" pursued Vane.
"I knew there was a raft of fellows who took investments
in things that they voted for. But I supposed there were
some exceptions."

The lobbyist knew that there were exceptions; he had
learned by dint of rebuffs that Congressmen existed who
were either pure enough or rich enough to be above pe
cuniary temptation; but he was careful not to mention
this fact to his proposed victim.

"Well, you see how it is, at last," he resumed. "You
see that the candle of fame only lights up a game for
money, and now what's the use of your holding different
notions from everybody else? You haven't been practical,
John Vane; you've been eccentric and highfalutin. I put
it to you, as one fair-minded business man to another, is
it generous or just for a capitalist to ask a member to
work for him gratis? I say not. If I see an honest chance
to make five thousand dollars, and you give me a lift
which enables me to use that chance, I ought to allow
you a share in the investment. And that's what I do.
I've got five thousand dollars of this inside stock "

175

Here he had another spasmodic start, which ended in
a prolonged fit of coughing, as though the brimstone
fumes which we have imputed to his breath were un
usually dense and stifling. Of course it could not have
been remorse or shame which interfered with his breath
ing, although the five thousand dollars which he talked
of had been given him to transfer to Vane, and although
his own private share of the "Hen Persuader" stock al
ready amounted to fifty thousand. Of remorse or shame
he must have been fundamentally incapable. If he felt
any human passion at this moment, it must have been a
peanut peddler's gladness.

"And I offer you twenty per cent of it," he continued,
when he had recovered his utterance. "That's about fair,
I think, for I've only this one investment on hand, and
can't possibly attend to more, while you can dip into all
the national enterprises that are going. And don't you
make Puritanic faces over it. It isn't money, you see.
So help me Lucifer! I wouldn't think of offering money
to you. It's just a business chance. Is there anything
low in a Congressman's putting his money where his con
stituents put theirs? Isn't he thereby joining his fortunes
with theirs? That's what I said to Greatheart and he
couldn't get round it, and he took the stock."

"I'll 111 take it, too," was John Vane's response,
a mere choked gasp of a response, but heard, perhaps,
all through Pandemonium.

"All right!" laughed Dorman, leaping up and giving
his member's back a slap, which ought to have left the
imprint of a fiery hand. "Well, I'll hold the stock for
you," he promptly added, with a sly sparkle in his smoky
eyes. "Just to keep your name off the books and out of
the newspapers, you understand."

176

Our Congressman pondered a full minute before he
replied. He was no longer Honest John Vane, but he
desired to remain such in the eyes of the public, and
consequently he did not want the stock in his own name.
At the same time he shrewdly doubted whether it would
be worth much to him, if it stood to the credit of Dor-
man. His countenance was at this moment a study for a
painter of character. There were two phases in it, the
one growing and the other waning, like the new moon
encroaching upon the old. In a moment you might say
that it had undergone a transfiguration, though not such
a one as apostles would desire to honor with tabernacles.
All the guile in his soul that slow, loutish guile which
lies at the bottom of so many low-bred and seemingly
simple natures rose to the surface of his usually genial
and hearty expression, like oily scum to the surface of
water. His visage actually took a physical lubricity from
it,, and shone like the fraudful superficies of a shaved and
greased pig.

"I won't trouble you to hold my property for me, Dar
ius," he said. 'Til hold it in my own name. Honesty is
the best policy."

This last phrase was a noteworthy one. It showed that
he had already entered upon the life of a hypocrite. A
little before he had been a living body of honesty; now
he was a vampire, but he still retained his decent carcass.

"Now, look here, John, would you?" hesitated
the lobbyist, who had hoped to make the shares stick
to his own fingers. "Christian and Greatheart and those
fellows haven't. You see, if there should be an exposure,
and this stock should be found in your name, you
wouldn't be on the investigating committee."

"Never mind, I'll do the square thing," replied Vane,

177

to whom it had suddenly occurred that the Great Sub-
fluvial and its "Hen Persuader" worked under separate
charters, so that a man who held property in one might
plausibly claim a right to vote on the other.

"O, well, if you insist upon it," assented Dorman, much
chagrined. "If you choose to risk it, why, of course
Well, now about paying for the stock; as you are hard
up, suppose we let the dividends go towards that."

"Suppose we don't," promptly returned Vane, remem
bering how direly he needed ready cash. "Suppose you
hand me the certificates at once, and the dividends as
fast as they fall in."

The lobbyist looked at his victim with an air of spite
qualified by admiration. Maelzel might have had a sim
ilar expression (though not by any possibility so vicious
and diabolical) when he was beaten at chess by his own
automaton.

"I have caught a Tartar," he grinned. "When you turn
your attention to finance, John, you show your business
training. Your game isn't the safest, though. All the sly
old hands, all the fellows who have graduated in the
lobbies of the State Legislatures, and bribed their way
from there into Congress, all those shysters have had
the shares sold for them and taken nothing but the plain
greenbacks. I see what your false bosom is made of,
John, the fair front of honest simplicity and ignor
ance. It may do you, and it may not. The faster a hog
swims the more he cuts his throat with his own hoofs,"
he added, with a spite which made him coarse. "You'd
better let me keep the stock for you."

"Well," sighed the imp, who had not bought a soul as
cheaply as he had hoped, "have it your own way, then.
I'll bring the certificate to-morrow."

178

now Honest John Vane had become
Dishonest John Vane, and justified Donnan's contemptu
ous nickname of Weathercock John.

He had accepted stock in a financial enterprise, which
might fairly be called a Juggernaut of swindling, on the
understanding that he would grease its rusted wheels
with fresh legislation, and help roll it once more through
the public treasury and over the purses of the people.

In so doing, he had trampled on such simian instincts
of good as had been born in him, on such development
of conscience as he had been favored with during his
sojourn in this christianly human cycle, on resolutions
which he knew to be noble, because everybody had told
him so, and on promises whereby he had secured power.
He had proved that^ so far as he could be a moral any
thing, he was a moral failure. In all the miscellaneous
"depravity of inanimate things/' he most resembled a
weak-jointed pair of tongs, such as pusillanimously cross
their legs, let their burdens drop back into the coals, and
pinch the hand which trusts them.

In short, he had easily fallen into the loose horde of
Congressional foragers or * < bummers," who never do one
stroke of fighting in the battle of real statesmanship, but

179

prowl after plunder in the trail of the guerillas of the
lobby. Their usual history, as the well-informed Darius
Dorman has already hinted to us, was this: they had ac
quired a mastery of log-rolling and bribery and stealing
in the halls or the lobbies of the State Legislatures; and,
having there gained sufficient wealth or influence, had
bribed their way to Congress, with the sole object of
plundering more abundantly. John Vane, on the con
trary, had been elected by a hopeful people, going about
with a lantern to look for an honest politician. He had
meant to be honest; he had, so to speak,, taken upon him
self the vows of honesty; and now, for a thousand or two
of dollars, he had broken them. He differed from a ma
jority of his brethren in piratical legislation just as a
backslider and hypocrite differs from a consistent sinner.

Can we palliate his guilt? We repeat here, for the
moral importance of the fact will justify iteration,
that he came of a low genus. It was a saying of the
oldest inhabitant of Slowburgh, that "up to John's time
there never had been a magnificent Vane." No more was
there one now. Although some blessed mixture had clari
fied the family soul in him a little, he still retained much
sediment deposited by the muddy instincts of his ances
tors, and a very little shaking stirred it all through his
conduct. Proper breeding and education might have
made him a permanently worthy soul; but of those puri
fying elements he had been favored with only a few
drops. He had risen somewhat above his starting-point,
but he still remained below the highest tide-water mark
of vice, and got no foothold on the dry land of the loftier
moral motives. Sidling crab-like about in these low
grounds, the daily flood rolled in and submerged him.

It is impossible to insist too strongly upon the fact that
he had no sound self-respect and lofty sense of honor.

180

Of that noble pride which renders unassailable the in
tegrity of a Washington, a Calhoun, an Adams, or a
Summer, he had not laid the lowest foundation, and per
haps could not. In place of this fortress, he possessed
only the little, combustible block-house of vanity. All,
or nearly all, his uprightness had sprung from a desire to
win the hurrahs of men who were no better than him
self, or who were his inferiors. The title of Honest John
(knocked down to him at such a shamefully low price
as must have given him but a slight idea of its value)
had merely tickled his conceit, as red housings tickle
that of a horse. It was a fine ornament, which distin
guished him from the mass of John Vanes, some of whom
were in jail. It was a nom de guerre, by aid of which
he could rally voters around him, and perhaps win fur
ther glories at the polls. Mainly for these trivial and
merely external reasons had he striven to hold on to it,
and not because he believed that reputation, self-respect,
and sense of honor were precious, far more precious than
happiness or even life.

Such a motive force is of course no force at all, but a
mere weathercock, which obeys the wind of public opin
ion, instead of directing it. Vane had now been exposed
for some time to a moral breath which differed greatly
from that of his hard-working, precise, exact, and gen
erally upright constituents. In the first place, he had
found, as he thought, that in Washington his title of
Honest brought him no influence and little respect. He
suspected that it was chiefly his unwillingness to have a
finger in the fat pies of special legislation which had
caused him to be kept on the minor committees. He saw
other members, who were as new, as untrained, and as
comically ignorant as himself, but who had the fame
among the lobbyists of being "good workers," and able

181

to "put things through," he saw them called to posi
tions of distinguished responsibility, far higher on the
roll of honor than himself. He learned, or supposed he
had learned, that many Congressmen kept Uncle Sam's
eagle setting on their own financial eggs. He knew mem
bers who had come to Washington poor, and who now
owned square miles on the lines of great railroads, and
rode in their carriages, while he and his wife walked.
For a time, the prosperity of these knaves had not punc
tured his soap-bubble honesty, because he still believed
that there was a Congressional public which condemned
them and respected him. Classing himself with Senators
Christian and Faithful, and with those almost equally
venerated images, Representatives Greatheart and Hope
ful, he continued for a time to stand proudly in his hon
ored niche, and to despise the rabble of money-changers
below.

But at last Dorman had told him, and his necessities
easily led him to believe, that he was alone in his virtu
ous poverty; Christian, Greatheart, and the other reputed
temples of righteousness, were nothing but whited sepul
chres, full of railroad bonds and all uncleanness. This
illumination from the secrets of the pit bewildered him,
and caused him to topple from the narrow footing of his
probity. He resolved that he would not be the only case
of honest indigence and suffering in the whole political
world. Besides, what risk did he run of losing his home
popularity by accepting a few golden eggs from the mani
pulators of the Hen Persuader? The fact might become
current news in Hell, but it would never reach Slow-
burgh. Was it likely that Congress would expose the
interior of a thieving machine on which so many of its
members had left their finger-marks? Even if an investi
gation should be forced, there was such a trick as doing

182

it with closed doors, and there was such a material as
committee-room whitewash.

There was still a momentous question before Vane,
the question whether he would continue to walk with the
Mammonite crew, or make use of his deliverance from
debt to resume his former respectable courses. The man
ner in which he decided it furnishes another proof of the
jelly-fish flabbiness which characterized his rudimentary
nature. Many a cultivated spirit tumbles once down the
declivity of guilt, and then climbs back remorsefully to
the difficult steeps of well-doing. But our self -manufac
tured and self -instructed hero continued to stick in the
mud where he had drifted, like any other mollusk, and
absorbed and fattened and filled his shell, a model of
stolid and immoral content.

Just in one direction the only direction in which he
had been thoroughly educated he showed energy. At
business he had worked hard and made himself what is
called a good business man, sharp-sighted in detecting
his own interest, and vigorous in delving for it. If in the
present case he had not made a particularly fine bargain
for himself, it had been because he was new to that
thieves* brokerage, the lobby, and bewildered at finding
himself hustled into it. But, although he had sold his
virtue at a low figure, he was now determined to get the
full price agreed upon. As Dorman did not bring him
the promised certificate of stock, he sought him out and
secured it. Next he heard that a dividend had fallen due
on the day of his purchase; hence another call on his
fellow-sinner, and a resolute demand for the sum total of
said dividend.

"But the transfer is dated the day after the dividend,"
objected Dorman, who like the rest of his subterranean

183

kind, did not want to pay a cent more for a soul than
he could help.

Tes, I know it is," answered Dishonest John Vane,
angrily. "And that's a pretty trick to play on a man whose
help you ask for. Now I want you to make that transfer
over again,, and date it the day on which I took the stock,
and pay me the dividend due on it."

Dorman, wizened with disappointed greed and sly
ness, looked less like a triumphant goblin than usual,
and more like a scorched monkey. His wilted visage
twitched, his small, quick, vicious eyes glanced here and
there anxiously, and he had an air of being ready to
drop on all fours and scramble under a table. Never
theless, as there was no resisting a lawgiver of the United
States, he corrected the certificate and paid the dividend.

'1 don't see how I came to make this blunder," he
chattered, arching his eyebrows as apologetical monkeys
do.

"You don't pronounce it right; it wasn't blunder, but
plunder," smiled Vane, with a satirical severity, sugges
tive of Satan rebuking Sin.

184

an amazingly short time after these solvent
providences had befallen Weathercock John, all the lob
byists out of Gehenna seemed to have learned that he
was "approachable."

These turkey buzzards have a marvelous aptitude at
scenting a moral carcass, and Vane, who did not so much
as suspect that he was dead, must have been already in
need of burial, and pungently attractive to their abom
inable olfactories. They gathered around him and settled
upon him, until he might be described as fairly black
with them. Gentlemen who, to be in character, ought
to have had raw necks and a sore-toed gait, croaked into
his ears every imaginable scheme for pilfering, not only
the fatness and the life-blood, but the very bones out of
Uncle Sam. It is arithmetically certain that, had every
one of these pick-purse plans been carried out success
fully, the Secretary of the Treasury would have had to
suspend all manner of payments.

Among so many golden bows of promise, Weathercock
John was able to make a judicious pick, and to find lots
of full purses at the ends of them. He would have noth
ing to do with "national highways/* because he was al
ready highwaying it on the line of the Great Subfluvial,

185

and did not want to become known as one of the "rail
road ring."

He selected the congenial case of a deceased horse,
who had been killed by our troops in Western New York
during the war of 1812, and who had already drawn his
ghostly claim for damages through five Congresses,, the
amount thereof quadrupling with every successive jour
ney, so that it had risen from $125 to $32,000.

Also he pitched upon the case of certain plantation
buildings in Florida, which had been destroyed by the
same indiscreet soldiery while striving to defend them
from the Seminoles, or by the Seminoles while struggling
to take them from the soldiery; and which, by dint of
repeated "settlements and adjustments on principles of
justice and equity," every settlement being made the pre
text of a new adjustment, and every adjustment the
pretext of a new settlement, had grown in worth from
about $8,000 to about $134,000, one of the most re
markable instances of the rise of property ever witnessed
in a thinly settled country.

Likewise he hit upon the grievance of a mail con
tractor, who, having failed to carry his mails and so for
feited his contract, now demanded (through his heirs)
$10,000 in damages; also $15,000 for mail services, in
addition to those not rendered; also $20,000 of increased
compensation for the mail services not rendered, together
with interest and costs to the amount of $15,000 more.

These and some dozen other similar swindles, our
member took under his legislative protection, proposing
to put them through as such little jokers usually are put
through; that is, by tacking them on to appropriation bills
at the very end of the session. As for remuneration, he
was fair minded enough to be content with ten per cent
on each successful claim, whereas some unscrupulous

186

statesmen extorted as much as fifteen or twenty. It is
needless to say that, in view of this conscientious mod
eration, the lobby itself was stricken with a sense of
unholy gratitude, and began to shout through its organs,
"Hurrah for Honest John Vane!" You may imagine how
it delighted and strengthened him to find that, no matter
what villainous trick he played upon the public, he could
not lose his glorious nickname. So cheered was he by
this incongruous good fortune that he ventured to intro
duce a little bill of his own into Congress, appropriating
$50,000 for a new cemetery for "the heroic dead of the
late war," the contract for the coffins to be awarded to
one Elnathan Sly, who was his own man of straw or
alter ego.

Meantime he would have nothing to do with those
visionary projects which "had no money in them." His
motto was, "No Irish need apply," meaning thereby indi
gent applicants for legislation, or applicants who would
not offer to go snacks. When an author urged him to
introduce an international copyright bill, he cut short his
visitor's prosing about the interests of literature by say
ing brusquely, "Sir, I may as well tell you at once that
I don't care anything about this subject, and I don't be
lieve anybody can make me care about it." When some
simple college professors wanted him to propose an ap
propriation for the observation of an eclipse, he got rid
of the venerable Dryasdusts by a stroke of rare humor,
telling them that his specialty was Revolutionary pen
sions. When a wooden-legged captain of volunteers ap
plied to him for the Slowburgh Post-Office, he treated
him with promises, which sent him home promptly in
high spirits, and then secured the position for one of his
own wire-pullers, a man who had enlisted for the war
in the Home Guards.

187

A great change, you will say; an unnaturally sudden
eclipse; an improbably complete decadence. Not so; in
his inmost being Vane had not altered; only in the in
crustations of life deposited by surroundings. Barring
the molluscous characteristics of easy good nature, and
that sort of companionable generosity which amounts
to give and take, he had never been beneficent and un
selfish. He had not moral sympathy enough to feel the
beauty of virtue in the individual, nor intellect enough
to discover the necessity of virtue to the prosperity of
society, nor culture enough to value any educational in
strument finer than a common school. Considering the
bare poverty of his spiritual part, indeed, our Congress
man was merely a beggar on horseback; and it was no
wonder that,, once temptation got him faced hellwards,
he rode to the devil with astonishing rapidity.

Well, John Vane fell from respectable indigence into
degradingly thrifty circumstances. He paid all the debts
which he had incurred during his abnormal, or at least
accidental, course of honesty, and knew no more what
it was to be without a comforting roll of pilfered green
backs in his pocket. He hired a fine carriage for his wife,
and gave her all the funds that she needed for entertain
ments and shopping, thereby arousing in her fresh respect
and affection. Indeed, he so far satisfied the pecuniary
expectations of Olympia that she no longer found the
wealthy Ironman necessary to her happiness, and fell
into a prudent way of discouraging his attentions. Once
more our member's home was tranquil, and he happy
and glorious in the midst of it. A man who can dazzle
and fascinate his own wedded Danae with showers of
gold is nothing less than a Jove of a husband.

It is worth noting that Olympia had no scruples about
using these unaccustomed riches, and never once asked

188

where they came from. Had she learned that they were
filched from the public treasury, would she have ac
cepted and spent them the less freely? A venerable Con
gressman, thoroughly versed in all the male and female
wickedness of Washington, assures me that women are
conscienceless plunderers of public property, and will
steal any official article which they can lay hands on,
from a paper-folder upward.

At last came the end of the session. As is always the
case, it was a season of wild turmoil and uproar, by no
means resembling one's idea of legislation, but more like
a dam breaking away. The House was as frantic with
excitement and as noisy with dissonant speaking as was
the tower of Babel after the confusion of tongues. Hon
orable members who had special bills to push were par
ticularly active and sonorous. They spouted; they tacked
on amendments; they electioneered among their brother
lawgivers; they were incredibly greedy and shameless.
An imaginative observer might have fancied himself in
a huge mock-auction shop, with two or three score of
impudent Peter Funks hammering away at once, while
dead horses were knocked down at a hundred times the
price of live ones, and burnt bams, empty cotton bags,
rotten steamers, and unbuilt railroads went at similar
swindling prices, the victimized purchaser in every case
being a rich simpleton called Uncle Sam. The time, tal
ents, and parliamentary skill of the honest members were
nearly all used up in detecting and heading off the im
mortal steeds which were turned into the national pas
tures by the dishonest ones. Many measures of justice,
of governmental reform, and even of departmental ne
cessity were, perforce, overlooked and left untouched.
It seemed as though the only thing which Congress was

189

not under obligation to attend to was the making of laws
for the benefit of the whole people.

In this raid of special legislation upon real legislation
John Vane was one of the most active and adroit guerillas.
His "genial" smile simpered from desk to desk, like Hec
tor's shield blazing along the ranks of Trojan war. He
had never smiled so before; he very nearly smiled him
self sick; he proved himself the smiler of smilers. There
was no resisting such an obviously warm-hearted fellow,
especially as he was generous, too, offering to vote as he
would be voted for. And everything prospered with him;
the taxes gathered from his countrymen melted on his
schemes like butter on hot pancakes; and when he left
the House at midnight he was a man in "respectable
circumstances ."

He now had funds enough to carry the next nominat
ing caucus in his district, and thus, with Dorman's potent
aid, to make fairly sure of a return to Congress. As he
had once swept the ballot-boxes as Honest John Vane,
so he purposed to sweep them again as Dishonest John
Vane. But is the golden calf of lobbydom to be the di
recting deity of our politics forever? Is no axe to be laid
to the root of this green bay tree of Slowburgh? We
shall see.

190

were the prospects of Wea
thercock John in the face of that terrible scrutiny of
political character, a new election?

He had now served two years in the honorable Con
gress of the United States, after such a fashion that, could
he have had his deserts, he would have served ten more
in jail.

But as the mountain brigands of Greece and the
municipal highwaymen of New York can both testify
it is not the custom of some communities to execute jus
tice upon criminals, so long as injustice is procurable for
love or money. Moreover, our ignominious member had
thus far been able to keep that cardinal eleventh com
mandment, "Thou shalt not be found out/* He was still
worshiped by the simple and lowly masses of his district
as Honest John Vane; and, furthermore, he had store of
that golden oil which is one of the best of all lubricators
for the wheels of political fortune.

Thus, instead of going to the tread-null and becoming
an object of reverential pity to sentimental philanthrop
ists, he went into a canvass for re-election at the head
of a faithful flock of baaing adherents, who did not see
how- he had led them through the brambles of needless

191

taxation, and who were so bewitched with the instinct
of following a bellwether that, had they discovered all
of Vane's ignorance and rascality, they would not have
deserted him. Not that he bought the popular suffrage
with money y or could do it. Thanks be to the remaining
mercy of Heaven, few freemen as yet sell their votes in
Slowburgh. Having no feculent system of special legis
lation to rot them with its drippings, they are for the
most part of sounder morals than the adventurers who
contrive to represent them. But there were wire-pullers
to be conciliated, oratorical forums to be hired, posters
and ballots to be printed, vote-distributors to be paid.
Vane's tithes from his relief and subsidy bills covered
these expenses nicely, and to the entire satisfaction of
an enlightened and moral constituency, fond of economy
in national legislation, and boastful of the honesty which
a republic is supposed to generate.

Of course he found the franking privilege as useful as
if he had never denounced it. He was almost grateful
in these campaigning days for the congressional insig
nificance which had disenabled him from reforming that
abuse. A so-called secretary, whom he had left in Wash
ington with several thousand "franks," sold one half of
those autographs as his own perquisite, and deluged
Vane's field of labor with the other half. Every mechanic
in Slowburgh got a report on agriculture, and every
farmer got a report on manufactures. The speeches
which the so-called secretary had written, and which our
member had obtained leave to print in the Congressional
Globe without preliminary delivery, fell in such abundant
showers throughout the district that it was a wonder
they had not been foretold in the almanac. The Wash-
ingtonian assistant, by the way, must have been a fellow
of some ability; he managed this system of political ir-

192

rigation not only with vigor, but with judgment. For
example, among all the public documents with which he
fructified Slowburgh, there was not a single copy of the
Report on the Corruption of Members of Congress. It
was judicious, certainly; for had we been brought to
remember the infamy of Matteson, we might not have
been so happy in voting for Vane.

There was, indeed, one ugly week, when it seemed
as if the torches of our nocturnal processions burned
blue, and we almost feared to look at our candidate lest
we should see signs of unworthiness in his face. Certain
lobbyists, who had not been able to get what they
thought their allowance of eggs out of the Hen Persua
der, set afloat vindictive stories to the effect that that
wonderful financial machine was nothing but a contriv
ance to corrupt Congressmen into voting favors to the
Great Subfluvial, and that its retaining fees had been
pocketed by some of the most famous champions of our
party, such as Christian, Greatheart, and Honest John
Vane.

These charges were picked up and used for ammuni
tion by a brazen opposition which was as deep in the
mud as we were in the mire. Every shot spread con
sternation through our array. There was danger lest we
should set up the Gaulish war-cry of Nous sommes trdhis,
and either flinch from the polls or vote a split ticket.
Even the political priesthood of wire-pullers, who stood
about Vane as the Scotch Presbyterian elders encom
passed Leslie, began to doubt whether it would not be
well to make another nomination. But in the end this
select and tried synagogue (of Satan?) decided to stick
to their candidate and to patch up the rents in his ephod.
They began by denying flatly that he owned any Hen
Persuader stock, or any other property connected with

193

the Great Subfluvial. Next they set a committee over
him to prevent him from avowing such ownership. This
committee guarded him all day and put him to bed at
night; it went before him like a cloud and behind him
like a darkness,, keeping him constantly shrouded in non-
committalism; it held interviewing reporters at a dis
tance, or whispered evasive answers to their questions.
Never was a Grand Lama or a Roi Faineant more com
pletely secluded. Only a deaf-mute, with all his fingers
amputated, could be laid under such a conversational
embargo.

This inspired discretion had its reward; various provi
dences arrived to favor it. Good and true men perceived
that the whole air was full of "campaign lies/* and nat
urally inferred that this story about the Hen Persuader
briberies was one of them. Moreover, it was soon "nailed
to the counter" by positive and public letters of denial
from Christian, Greatheart, and other implicated sera
phim. Of course such men would not prevaricate, we
argued, and considered the charges entirely refuted. And
now we justified Weathercock John; we imputed his si
lence to the conscious rectitude of a worthy soul; we said
that he had done rightly in treating slander with unre
sponsive scorn. Thus reassured, we went in a solid pha
lanx to the polls, and triumphantly sent our special legis
lator back to Congress.

Nobody was better pleased with the victory than Dar
ius Dorman. It was, by the way, somewhat of a satire
upon our human joy that such a "burnt eyed nigger" of
the pit, such a mere fieldhand in the earthly plantation
of Lucifer, should have shared it. The moment he heard
the result he looked up Vane and congratulated him in
forms and liturgies of profanity not often heard above
ground.

194

"It is a triumph of the good cause," he continued, with
so sarcastic a grin that our heavy-witted member thought
him either impertinent or crazy; "and y by the infernal
hoofs and horns, the good cause needed it. If we had
been beaten, the Great Subfluvial would have been
smashed to make way for some other national enterprise.
As it is, I think we can keep things white-washed, and
perhaps head off an investigation altogether."

"An investigation!" exclaimed Vane, his genial smile
falling agape with dismay. "Do you think there will be
an investigation?"

"You may bet what soul you have on it/* declared the
lobbyist. "Just as sure as the party believes those charges
to be false, it will demand an overhauling of them, of
course, to confound the opposition."

Our Congressman saw the point, and seemed to feel
it in his marrow. "If they look this thing up/' he gasped,
"what's to become of me?"

"I don't know and I don't care/' responded Dorman,
with a frank brutality which made Vane resolve not to
quarrel with him; "what I want to know is, what's to
become of me? Here I have all my results and my ma
terials of labor in those two companies. If the Hen Per
suader is called on to refund to the Subfluvial, or if the
Subfluvial is foreclosed on by the government, I am a
poor devil for certain. Well,, we are in the same boat;
we must pull together. If you won't expose my fashion
of doing business, I won't expose your share in the profits
of it/
Vane answered in his non-committal fashion; he said
nothing, and he did not even look at his guide and ruler
in sin; but he gently nodded his assent.

"I always meant to pay you for that stock," he con-

195

timied, for he was very anxious now to make friends
with this Mammon of unrighteousness. "I'll settle with
you for it some day, Darius; I'm a little short now. This
election, you know."

"O, yes, I know/' Dorman grinned epileptically. "It
has cost us both a good bit of money. Well, take your
time about it; pay me when it comes handy. I can trust
your honesty, John, under the circumstances."

The Congressman turned away, full of an inward
wrath, but placid, meek, and sleek on the surface, for
his tallowy nature did not come easily to an open boil.
He was angry at the lobbyist for his sarcasm; he perfectly
hated him for that avarice and hardness which would
not give a receipt for payment on those shares,, without
the money; but he must not and would not quarrel with
him, so brotherly is the communion of Satan!

196

once Dorman was correct in a proph
ecy. The recollection of the "Great Subfluvial slanders' 7
rankled in the soul of an honest and truth-loving nation.
After the election had been carried and the country
duly saved from its quadrennial crisis, it seemed just
and necessary to put calumny to open shame, and thus
rob it of influence in the future. Virtuous constituencies
and a press which at least spoke the words of virtue
clamored for an investigation which should vindicate the
innocence of Christian, Greatheart, and Company, and
put their lying accusers in the pillory. "We want justice
done you," cheerfully shouted a believing party to its
demi-gods, streaming piteously with the rotten eggs of
the Hen Persuader.

It was in vain that these revered fetishes whispered
to their confidants that justice was precisely what they
were afraid of, and interceded with such divinities as
they believed in to save them from their friends. In vain
did a sadly wise Congress endeavor to amuse and pacify
the country by throwing overboard that precious tub of
abuses, the franking privilege. In vain did Weathercock
John set his daily organ to celebrating and imputing to
himself a reform which he had so long promised and

197

which he now so unwillingly conceded. The popular
whale took no notice of a plaything which at any other
time might have diverted it for years, and continued to
thrash the political ocean into foam with its rushings and
plungings after investigations.

Amid this commotion John Vane rowed about in his
cockle-shell of a character with all the agility that terror
can give. He was so accustomed to value himself on be
ing honest that the thought of being publicly condemned
as dishonest was almost as dreadful to him as it would
have been to an upright soul. So oppressive was his
wretchedness that he craved not only help but also sym
pathy, that favorite consolation of the sorrowful feeble.
He was in the spiritual state of certain weak-minded
murderers, who cannot sleep of nights until they have
told some friend the particulars of their crime. So en
tirely had the backbone been taken out of him that he
could not hold himself erect in the presence of his wife,
but wilted upon her slight shoulder for support. It was
an abject confession of decrepitude; for he had learned
to consider her as totally lacking in practical sense, and
there were impatient moments when he thought of her
as merely a lively dunce. But now he must have pity,
though it came from a peacock.

"I'm afraid there's trouble a brewing for us," he said,
one evening, shaking that perplexed head of his which
had been the admiration of his constituents, and which
certainly looked large enough to hold all the problems
of state.

"What's the matter now?" asked Olympia.

She did not think of trouble to the nation, nor of
trouble to her husband. The only idea which occurred
to her was that perhaps there was a scarcity of money,

198

and she might be called on to give up the honors of
house keeping and put on the disgusting humility of
lodgings. It was also a little disagreeable to her, this
way that John sometimes got into of coining to her with
his grievances, and trying to ease his own mind by bur
dening hers. It was hardly more pleasant than having
a dog make a bed for himself on the skirts of one's lilac
silk. She possessed in large measure that unsympathy,
alleged by some writers to amount to hostility, which
certainly does exist to some extent between the sexes.
Her world was very different from her husband's world,
and she did not much care to have him take an interest
in hers, nor did she want at all to worry about his. That
the two spheres had any intimate connection she could
rarely perceive, except when the masculine one ceased
to radiate gold upon the feminine one.

"Well, the matter is this stupid outcry for investiga
tions/* sighed John, loosening the cravat about his some
what pulpy throat, as if fearful lest it should make a
hangman's circle there.

"What investigations? Who is to be investigated?*
demanded Olympia, who was as ignorant of the whole
matter as if she were an inhabitant of some celestial
world where investigations were not needed, or of some
infernal one where they were of no use.

"Well, it's a secret," the special legislator continued
to drawl, talking about his misdeed unwillingly, but un
able to stop talking about it. "However, I suppose itll
all be out before long. I thought I might as well pre
pare your mind for it," he concluded, feebly hoping that
she would say something to prepare his mind.

"Well, what is it?" asked the wife, distinctly foreseeing
trouble for herself, and becoming therefore deeply in
terested.

199

"O, I thought I told you," answered John, whose scared
conscience had been babbling at such a rate that it
seemed to him as if he had made audible confession of
his whole iniquity. "Well, it's something about this Great
Subfluvial Tunnel under the Mississippi, from the Lakes
to New Orleans, great national enterprise, you know.
You see, it was a pretty heavy thing for Simon Sharp
and the other boss stockholders to carry, and they had
to get some additional assistance from Congress, and to
do that they gave some of the members stock, or
rather sold it to them/* he added, doubting whether he
could trust even his wife with all the truth. "Well, some
of the newspapers are charging that this is bribery and
corruption, and are bawling for an investigation and mak
ing a row generally, as though it was anything new, by
George!"

"Have you got any of the stock?" inquired Olympia.
She saw that the subject was a sore one to her husband,
but she was not much in the habit of sparing his feelings,
and so was able to come promptly and squarely to the
point.

"Not much," replied John, loosening his cravat once
more. "Only a thousand."

"That isn't much," said the wife, rather scorning him
for not having received more. "Why don't you sell it and
get it off your hands?"

Vane made no answer. Of course, selling the stock
would not hide the fact that he had owned it, nor shield
him from ugly questions as to how he came to be pos
sessed of it. But it seemed useless to try to explain this
to Olympia,. women were so irretrievably dark-minded
in business matters.

"Does it pay anything?" she asked, merely guessing

200

from his silence that the property was profitable, and
that therefore he did not wish to part with it.

"About fifteen hundred a year/' confessed the hus
band, with a sheepish air; "or maybe two thousand."

"Two thousand!" exclaimed the modern Portia, who,
as a legislator, was even more "self-taught" than her hus
band, and consequently more unscrupulous. "Why, you
mustn't think of selling it."

The statesman gazed at his privy counsellor in despair.
She could not grasp the situation, and he might have
known that she could not. To appeal to such a woman
for advice and consolation in great trouble was much
as if a drowning man should trust to a raft made of
millinery.

"It's all very well to talk that way, as though it was
as easy as A B C," he answered, quite out of patience
with the straw which he had clutched at to so little pur
pose. "But supposing this costs me my seat? Supposing
I get expelled for it? Then you'll understand, I reckon,
that it is of some consequence, and not so very handy
to manage."

Olympia perceived that dulness was imputed unto her,
and she felt very angry at the injustice. She knew that
she was not dull; nobody ever hinted such an idea but
her husband; other men complimented her for her clever
ness, her social powers, etc.

"Then what did you get yourself in such a scrape for?"
she retorted sharply. *Tou needn't blame me for it; I
didn't do it."

""Yes, you did," insisted John, and with much truth.
"I got into this very scrape to raise money for your house
keeping and receptions and carriages and all those other
confounded ruinous things that you could have got along

201

just as well without. And, by George, the whole fol-de-
rol nonsense has got to stop!" he exclaimed, his long-
continued excitement over the threatened investigation
bursting up in an explosion of domestic wrath. "We
don't keep house this session. And we don't stay here
at the Arlington, neither. We go back to a boarding-
house; and we go to parties afoot, too. The omnibus
ain't running this session," he added, with a bitterly
jocose allusion to "omnibus bills," and their profitable
loads of special enactments. "Shoe-leather will have to
do our traveling. It's all the turn-out that I can pay for."
Of course there was a scene. Of course Olympia did
not surrender her woman's right to luxury without a
tearful and little less than hysterical struggle. But John
Vane, rendered pitiless by terror concerning his political
future, was for once master over his own household. He
made arrangements that very day for leaving his fine
rooms in the Arlington and going into lodgings. At first
sight, his economy seems unnecessarily hard, in view of
the fact that he still had several thousand dollars left
out of the illegal gleanings of the last session, and thus
was a richer man than when he first came to Washing
ton. But this money had gone into the purchase of a
new patent in refrigerators, and he could not realize on
it without sacrificing a very promising business chance.
Moreover,, he saw that in the present public excitement
about "jobbing" legislation, he must forego its emolu
ments for a time, and thus diminish his income. Finally,
it seemed to be absolutely necessary to put on the guise
of poverty, if he cared to preserve his repute for honesty.
All these things he explained to Olympia, in a discreetly
vague way, remembering the while that she might be
just goose enough to go and cackle it abroad, but anxious,
nevertheless, to make her contented with him.

202

"You see, we have been going it rather strong on style/'
he added. 'Ten thousand dollars a year is a pretty tall
figure for four persons, two of 'em children. I suppose
we got into that way because other people set the ex
ample/' he concluded, not wishing to be hard on his wife.

"If we could only have the rooms on the first floor, I
could stand it for a while/' was the response of the
insatiable Olympia, a pathetic tear fringing her long and
really lovely eyelashes. "They are only fifteen dollars a
month more, and then we would have a nice parlor, or
at least a decent one."

"That means dinners, I s'pose," grinned Vane, testily.
"Big dinners and little receptions."

"Do you want to shut me out of the world altogether?"
was the desperate cry of this persecuted wife.

"Now look here: I would do it, I would if I could,"
groaned the weak monster of a husband. "If I had a
thousand dollars of capital loose, I'd spend it that way,
or any way to please you."

"Why don't you borrow?" was the suggestion of a help
meet -whose ideas of a loan did not extend so far as the
repayment. "I'm sure I have gentlemen friends who
would be willing to lend you something."

Although she said "friends," she was thinking of Sen
ator Ironman, and her husband easily divined it. Should
he be angry at the suggestion and reject it with self-
respectful scorn? Well, he was not so sensitive as he had
been when he came to Washington; somehow or other
he did not care so much about the look of things and
the name of things; on the whole, he could not feel in
dignation, or at least none to speak of. Indeed, his dis
integration of moral sentiments had gone farther than
that stage of indifference which simply allows things to

203

take their own course. After meditating for some time
over his wife's advice to borrow of her friends, he de
cided to follow it.

"It would be better to let Ironman lend me the money
than to run the chance of his lending it to her," he rea
soned. "And then I can tell him that I am hard up, and
give him a hint to let other people know it. By George,
it's a queer position for an old business man to be in/'
he added with a mixture of chagrin and amusement; "I
never thought once that I should come to want to be
considered bankrupt."

204

the Honorable Mr. Vane was
shown into Senator Ironman's library, his usually pink
face wore that pallor -which anxieties will bring, especi
ally when they are accompanied by discontent with one's
self.

The equally pink, though bony and narrow visage of
the senator also lost some of its natural color as he ad
vanced to welcome his visitor. It was, by Jove, very
queer, he thought, that Vane should drop in at that time
of day, just after a fellow's breakfast, as though he were
an intimate friend. The two men, we must understand,
were not fundamentally fond of each other, as is often
the case with two men who admire the same lady.

"I don't altogether fancy Vane," the senator had con
fessed to his familiars. "Now Mrs. Vane is a magnificent
creature, thoroughly well bred and well educated
that is, enough so for society, you understand, a
whole-souled, splendid, dazzling woman, and and as
jolly as possible. She is a woman that shows well in a
dance or anywhere. By Jove, she's a stunner, that wo
man is. I don't know another lady in Washington that
could wear crimson roses in her hair without looking
faded. She becomes a bouquet superbly, and, by Jove,

205

I love to give them to her, she shows one off sol But
Vane is another sort of animal altogether. He is rather
rather in fact, rather dull," judged the great man,
hitting on the right word at last. "And just a little low,
too," he added. "Don't always speak the best grammar.
One of your heavy, self-taught men," he explained, for
getting that his own father had begun life as an hostler.
"Low man on the whole; in some points, very low
and dull. 9 '

So you perceive he did not admire his visitor, not as
much as Slowburgh would have expected. But there
were other causes for the Dundreary perplexity which
now winked from his pale eyes and crisped his limited
forehead. He had noted Vane's unusual ghastliness, and
the circumstance alarmed him. What had the man got
on his low and dull mind? Was he going to say anything
disagreeable about the Ironman bouquets and carriage-
drives and other marks of esteem accorded to Mrs. Vane.
The senator was so eager and hurried in his expressions
of amity and welcome that he fairly stuttered.

"Mr. Ironman, I just dropped in to talk about this
Great Subfluvial row," commenced our member in a
slightly paralytic voice, for he was at least as much agi
tated as his host.

"O, O, indeed!" answered the relieved dignitary of
the upper house. "Sit down, sit down," he went on, smil
ing as cheerily as if the subject were an entirely delight
ful one. "Had your breakfast? Just as lieve order you
up something as not. Say a devilled kidney, now. Well,
take a glass of sauterne, then, or a cigar," he urged, for
getting that John was a tee-totaler and a non-smoker.

"I don't use either, thank you," said Vane, holding on
to what habits of virtue he had left, though he wanted

206

a glass of wine sadly. "Well, about this affair, now:
do you think there'll be an investigation?"

"Yes, O, yes; such a row about it, you know; can't help
coming to one; bad for those fellows that are in it,"
prattled the senator, either forgetting that the bulk of
his own fortune had come out of the lobby, or remem
bering with satisfaction that it had been harvested years
ago.

'With closed doors, I s'pose," hoped Dishonest John.

"Don't know about that, by Jove!" and Ironman shook
his statesmanlike head. "You see we don't want them
open; but now and then we have to give in to the news
paper fellows; there's such a row about it, you know! I'm
afraid some fellows have got to go overboard," he added,
much consoled by the thought that the fellows in ques
tion would be out of his way. "You see, when a man is
found out, it's bad for him."

"Well," sighed Vane, after a long silence, "I may have
to quit Washington,, then."

The senator opened his eyes. So Honest John Vane
was "in it," was he? It was curious, by Jove! and he
wondered he hadn't thought of it before, and then won
dered how it was that all those honest fellows ended so
badly. But these ideas were almost immediately chased
out of the confined boundaries of his mind by the re
flection that, if Vane left Washington, his wife would
go too.

"By Jove, that's bad," he broke out. "By Jove, that
won't do. We can't spare you and Mrs. Vane. My wife
won't know what to do," he explained, "if she loses Mrs.
Vane."

The heart of Mrs. Vane's husband grew a little lighter

207

under these acknowledgments of her importance to the
Ironmans.

"Look here! something might be done, you know,**
continued the senator, thinking harder than he had been
accustomed to think since he left school. "I'll run around,
myself, among the House fellows, by Jove! I'll ask 'em
if something can't be done."

In another instant he had an inspiration. "Look here!
Put you on the investigating committee! You needn't
investigate your own case, you know. That's it; I'll try
to get you put on the investigating committee. It'll help
you with the people,. clear up your record; don't you
see? And then, if the doors can be kept shut, why, you
do that, you know. Just the very idea!" he concluded,
quite happy over his unexpected attack of shrewdness.

"I'm afraid," confessed John Vane, still retaining a
little grain of conscience, and rendered timorous by it,
"it's a leetle too bold for me, with this stock on my
hands."

"I don't see why that should hinder," stared the ex
perienced senator. "Of course you bought the stock,
(it's the inside stock, isn't it?) without knowing that it
was hitched on to the Great Subfluvial."

"But I haven't paid for it," sighed Vane. "That's the
awkward part of the business. And that is partly what
I dropped in to see you about," he concluded, his face
turning crimson with shame.

"How much?" asked Ironman instantly. He under
stood that a loan was wanted, and he was willing to
make a moderate one; in fact, glad to do it.

"A thousand par," explained our fallen great man.

"O, that's nothing!" laughed the millionnaire, highly
amused that Vane should have sold his honesty for so

208

little. "Let me lend you enough to cover it. How much
will you have? Say fifteen hundred, now. Here," he con
tinued to laugh, as he went to his safe for the money to
hide a bribe, "this trap is always open to a friend. I've
had too many good dinners and pleasant evenings at
your house not to call you by that name."

"I hope you'll call often," mumbled John Vane in a
stifled voice, as he pocketed the greenbacks. "We shall
always be delighted to see you."

He felt driven to utter these commonplaces, but he
could not return thanks for the loan. He had a bitter
feeling or suspicion that he was not under obligations to
Ironman, and he was so far from being grateful to him
that he positively hated him. It was a satisfaction to him,
after he had got into the street, to look back at the house
menacingly, and mutter, "You won't see your funds again
in one while, old fellow, if you ever do."

This speech of his, by the way, is one of the circum
stances of his life from which we can most accurately
take his measure in regard to delicacy of feeling and
sensitiveness to dishonor.

His next business was to hurry to Dorman's office, and
announce that he had come to settle for "that stock."

"What's the damage?" he asked, not at all alluding
to the damage which his soul had received.

"How much do you propose to pay?" replied the lob
byist, his smoky eyes giving forth sparks of commingled
satire and greed.

"Why, par, of course," said John Vane, a little alarmed.
"That's the figure we talked of when I took it."

Dorman skipped about the room and rubbed himself
violently, much like a man who discovers that he has a
hornet inside his clothes.

209

"It's been worth three hundred all the while," he ex
claimed. "I could have sold it for three hundred the day
you got it."

Now Vane could not pay three hundred, nor two hun
dred, without great inconvenience. Moreover, he was a
bargainer born; a bargainer, too, by life-long habit, and
valued himself on it. He was as proud of his instinctive,
functional, and inevitable dexterity in a dicker as a crab
is said to be of walking sideways. So, although he was
afraid of Dorman, he resolved to show what he called
the spirit of a man, and to resist this low attempt at
extortion.

"Look here, Darius, that won't go down," he remon
strated. "The stock may have been worth three hundred
once, but it ain't worth it now. People don't want it any
more than they want shares in a broken bank with stock
holders liable. I'll bet a cookey" (John Vane was not a
sporting man, and did not mean to bet anything), "I'll
bet a cookey that you can't sell my share, nor anybody's
share, for a hundred. But I'll give that for it, because
I agreed to and like to stand by my word," he concluded
nobly.

"O, very well, anything you like!" grumbled the cor-
ruptionist, who saw that he must relinquish his plan for
getting back a part of the price which he had paid for
a soul.

"And I want a receipt dated back to day of transfer,"
continued Vane.

"Of course you do," grinned Dorman. "You want it
very much indeed. Well, if we give you one, what can
you do for us?"

"O, well, I don't know," drawled John, who by this
time had caught that easy jog-trot of manner which was

210

his bargaining gait. "You'll need a good deal done for
you before the thing is over/' he added, picking up the
morning Chronicle and pretending to read it. "If I was
in the right place," he continued, after a little, "of course
I could help you more or less/' After a further perusal
of the Chronicle, he resumed, "By the way, I met Iron-
man just now, and he gave me an idea which might work
well for you, providing it would work at all,"

"Nice fellow, Ironman," smirked Dorman. He guessed
immediately that Vane had been drawing on the rich
senator for money to pay for the stock; and he wanted
to stop him from making use of that resource, for he
wanted him poor and in his own power. "Eccentric per
son in some respects," he went on; "but genial, generous
fellow."

Either because there was offence in these remarks, or
because this black little creature's breath had some pun
gent quality, Vane suddenly turned away his head and
had a slight spasm of coughing, like a man who had
caught a whiff from a lucifer match.

"Yes," he assented presently, looking rather glum.
"Well, what was I saying? O, I know (and by the way,
this is between us), he suggested putting me on the
committee of investigation!"

Dorman laughed so violently that Vane could not help
joining him. The peach-blow face of the Congressman
turned crimson, and the sombre visage of the lobbyist
turned almost black, so apoplectic was their merriment.
There was also a sound of other hilarity, not so distinct
and therefore all the more singular, about the office.
There were faint but audible chuckles in the walls, along
the lofty ceiling, and under the floor.

"What's that?" asked Vane, looking about him with

a merely earthly and rather stolid suspicion of eaves
droppers.

"O, nothing that need interrupt us!" smiled Dorman.
'This used to be a dwelling-house, and had the name
of being haunted. Curious noises about it, you observe;
perhaps from subterranean passages to the devil knows
where; perhaps nothing but echoes. Well, John, I like
your plan. Here is your receipt for payment, dated back
to the day of transfer. Give me one thousand; no interest
from you. We are friends, John, forever," he concluded,
with a peculiar accent on the last word.

"I hope so," answered Vane mechanically, and not as
much alarmed as he ought to have been. **O, by the
way, where is Sharp? I want to see him about this."

"Yes, you'd better see him," said Dorman, who was
counting his bills, all miser again. "You'll find him at
home."

212

Simon Sharp, the member from the old
Whetstone State, was, it must be understood, the real
head of the Great Subfluvial corporation, and also of that
interior manifestation of it which we have called the
Hen Persuader.

As Vane hurried toward this honorable's house, he met
that eminent and venerated, but just now grievously
slandered statesman, Mr. Greatheart. The two could not
pass each other without a moment's discourse. By the
way, there was a vast deal of mysterious, muttered con
versation going on just now among Congressmen. They
had a subject in common, a subject of terrifying interest
to only too many of them, the subject of this approach
ing, unavoidable investigation. You could scarcely turn
a corner without discovering a couple of broad-backed,
thick-necked, and big-headed gentlemen leaning solemn
ly toward each other and engaged in such cautious, in
audible communion that it seemed as if they were speak
ing only through their staring eyes, or by means of some
twitching of their noses. The number of these duos, the
noiseless gravity with which they were conducted, the
usually swollen configuration of the performers in them,
and the stupefied astonishment which was depicted in

213

their faces, all reminded one of those numerous solemn
meetings of toads which may be seen after a shower.

Mr. Greatheart was not physically such a man as you
might have expected from his heroic name. There was
not a line about him,, either in the way of muscle or ex
pression, which could suggest descent from that stalwart
knight who guided Christiana through the Dark Valley.
He was short and squat in build, with a spacious, clean-
shaved, shining face, huge red wattles of cheeks hanging
down over his jaws, and a meek, non-combatant, semi-
clerical mien. A bacchanalian cardinal, who should lately
have turned Quaker, but lacked time to get the Burgundy
out of his complexion, might wear a similar physiognomy.
There was conscience in this visage, but there was also
spiritual pride and animal propensity, and perhaps other
evidences of a nature not yet made perfect. Good people
who believed in him knew him as a man whose public
career was famed for being spotless,, and whose private
life had been smirched here and there by innuendo.

Just now the Honorable Greatheart was evidently in
low spirits, not to say in a bewildering funk. Recalling
our batrachian simile, we might describe him as a toad
who looked as if he had eaten too many ants and got the
dyspepsia. In real truth he was ready to call on mush
rooms to hide him, and on molehills to cover him. His
condition was a sorry one, much sorrier than John Vane's.
He had pocketed Hen Persuader stock, and then had
publicly and positively denied the fact, either to save
his own reputation from the charge of bribery, or to
lighten the party ship over the breakers of the election.
Now there was to be an investigation, and the owner
ship of this malodorous property would be traced to him,
and he would be convicted of lying. Is it any wonder

214

that under such circumstances a reputed saint should
have somewhat the air of a reptile?

"Glad to see you, Vane/* he murmured, shaking our
member's hand fervently, for he was a cordial man \vhen
in adversity. "What do you judge to be the prospects
about an investigation?"

"Sure to come on, I hear," answered John, who was
much cheered by the results of his interviews with Iron-
man and Dorman, and remembered that he might yet sit
in judgment on Greatheart.

"So I understand," sighed that stumbled worthy, his
wattles drooping still lower and taking a yellowish tint.
"Ah well! we may suffer severely for this error. I con
ceive now, Mr. Vane, that it was an error. Yes y it was a
really terrible mistake," he went on conceding, for he was
in that mood of confession which gripes unaccustomed
mis doers under the threatenings of punishment. "A blun
der is sometimes worse than a crime, that is, worse in
its consequences. And circumstances are such in Wash
ington that the best-intentioned of us are occasionally
beguiled into very sad blunders."

"In spite of everything that we can do," eagerly af
firmed Vane, classing himself of course among the "best-
intentioned."

"Very few men are really fit for Congress," pursued
Mr. Greatheart, in a certain preaching tone which was
natural to him, he having once been a clergyman. "I
sometimes feel that I myself ought never to have come
here. I had neither the pecuniary means nor the stoical
character to grapple with the protean life of Washing
ton. It is too full of exigencies and temptations for any
human nature which is not quite extraordinary. The leg
islative system alone is enough to kill us. As long as

215

these subsidy bills and relief bills are allowed, no man
ought to run for Congress who is not a Croesus or a Cato.
A poor fellow will get into debt, and then the lobby
offers to help him out, and it is very hard to refuse. The
whole arrangement is terribly severe on men of small
means."

"Just so," feelingly assented Vane, who heard his own
decline and fall narrated, and was moved to compassion
by the tale. "It's too bad on us. Either the whole sys
tem of special legislation ought to be done away with,,
or else we ought to be allowed a regular percentage on
the appropriations we vote, and the thing made business
like."

"That that is a bold idea," smiled Greatheart, appar
ently not disapproving it. "Are you thinking of propos
ing it?"

"O, no!" exclaimed John, drawing back bodily in the
earnestness of his negation. "I suppose it would cost a
fellow his re-election."

"I suppose it would, unless he represented a very
staunch district," said Greatheart. "I don't know but
one man who would dare advocate such a plan. I think
if you have no objection that 111 mention it to
General Bourn."

And so these two penitents, who were ready to resume
thievery as soon as they could get free from their crosses,
bade each other a sad good morning and parted.

Next John found Mr. Sharp, and was received by him
with razor-strop smoothness, as that well-oiled gentle
man received everybody who could vote on his schemes.

"Do take a seat, Mr. Vane, take a seat without cere
mony," he begged, meanwhile softly handling his visitor
by the arms, much as though they were glass ones. "Let

216

me offer you this easy-chair. You honor me by accepting
it. I thank you kindly."

Vane had an instinctive desire to look at the sleeves
of his overcoat. It always seemed to him, after Mr. Sharp
had fingered him,, as if he must be greasy.

"I am exceedingly glad to see you here/' continued the
Whetstone representative, gazing as genially as he could
at our member through his cold, vitreous eyes. **I had
begun to fear that I was under such a cloud of misrepre
sentation and obloquy that my old friends would not
come to call on me. This great enterprise, which I have
had the honor to foster a little, according to my poor
measure of financial ability, has been terribly abused and
maligned. A national enterprise, too! a thing not only
beneficial, but absolutely necessary to the country! The
noblest scheme ever indorsed by the wisdom of Con
gress! What do people mean? What does the press
mean? What is this investigation -for? I am completely
bewildered/*

"It's giving the stock to Congressmen that has made
the row/* answered Vane, who judged that they might as
well come to the point at once.

"O, that is it?" grinned Mr. Sharp, with an air of get
ting light in the midst of really discouraging darkness.
"I am glad you have explained it to me. I should have
expected it from a man of your clearness of vision. I
thank you kindly. Well as to that matter why, that
is simple. I put the stock where it would do the most
good to a good thing/'

"Just so/* nodded Vane, meanwhile thinking what non
sense it was for Sharp to be talking gammon to him.
"But you see Well, never mind about that now; we
may as well get to business. There is sure to be an in
vestigation/'

217

"Exactly," answered the Whetstone member, sloughing
off his coating of "soft sawder/' and coming out as hard
and bright as a new silver dollar.

"And I have a smart chance of being put on the House
committee/' continued John.

Mr. Sharp opened the dark-lantern of his Puritanic
visage, and let out a smile which contained all the guile
of all the peddlers that ever sold wooden nutmegs.

"Mr. Vane/' said he, "are your arrangements about that
stock of yours completed to your entire satisfaction?"

"I have paid Dorman for it and got a receipt that -will
do me."

"Mr. Vane, do let me hand that money back/' pursued
Sharp, fumbling in his desk and producing a package of
bills. "It was a trifling mark of private amity and sincere
esteem. I never meant it should be paid for. Dorman
is an able business man, but hasn't an idea beyond trad
ing. I insist, Mr. Vane, on your taking back your money."

"Well from that point of view since you will
have it so/' smiled Dishonest John, pocketing the bills.

"Want any more of the stock?" inquired Sharp, with a
cunning twinkle in his half -shut eyes, as if he saw a way
to recover his thousand dollars.

"No!" answered Vane, not less promptly and positively
than if he had been offered a ladleful of pitch from the
infernal caldron.

"My dear sir y we are at your service," bowed the finan
cier. "Anything that we can do for you, call on us. Of
course you will have all our influence towards putting
you on that committee. Must you go? So obliged for
this call! Let me open the door for you. Thank you
kindly."

218

to the labors of sol
emn Mr. Sharp and of worldly Mr. Ironman, our mem
ber soon had a fair prospect of getting on the investigat
ing committee, supposing always that there should be
such a nuisance.

But the nearer he came to this post of responsibility
and honor, the more it looked to him as though it might
turn out a whipping-post, at which he would stand with
exposed shoulders and bleeding cuticle. If he as a judge
should be able to close the court-room doors, and keep
out not only spectators but also the witnesses in the case,
all might go famously well, at least from the Satanic
point of view. But if, while pretending to examine into
the little games of others, the same kind of cards should
be found up his own sleeves, he would be ruined beyond
a hope of re-election. The sad state of a boy whose
pockets are full of fire-crackers in a state of crackling and
scorching ignition, would be but a feeble image of such
a disaster. In these days he vacillated as rapidly and
disagreeably as if he were astride some monstrous shut
tlecock, or were being seesawed by all the giants of fairy
tale land. His pulpy pink face wore an air of abiding
perplexity which rivalled that of his Dundrearyish friend,

219

Iromnan. At times it seemed as if its large watery fea
tures would decompose entirely with irresolution, and
come to resemble an image of strawberry ice which has
been exposed to too high a temperature.

Meantime, the spectre of investigation advanced, and
its pointing finger renewed his sense of guilt. The ap
proach of punishment always enlightens a sinner marvel
lously as to the heinous nature of his sin. Even the
Devil, when visited by the hand of sickness, perceived
that he had led an evil life, and hungered to withdraw
from a world of temptation and thirsted to take holy
orders. Just so John Vane now discovered plainly once
more that he had been pocketing bribes and swindling
the public treasury, and that these were very wrong
actions. If he had never truly had a conscience before,
but had regulated his conduct by the consciences of
others, he at last possessed one of his own. Indeed, it
appeared to him a very large one because it was sore,
precisely as a man's nose seems large to him while yet
tender from a fisticuff. From one point of view, he was
an honester John Vane than he had ever been, inasmuch
as terror and remorse made him intelligently honest with
himself.

Before he could decide to accept a position on the
committee, he must be sure that Sharp & Co. would con
ceal his ownership of their stock, and he called on Dor-
man to obtain a positive promise to that effect. It is
wonderful, by the way, how rogues in distress will trust
each other's word, even when each knows by experience
that the other is a confirmee! liar.

"Look here, Darius, the more I stir up this business,
the worse it looks to me," he groaned from the summit
of a state of mind which almost raised him to the moral
altitude of a penitent thief.

220

Dorman responded by groaning over his end of the
burden, which naturally seemed to him much heavier
than Vane's; each of these invalids, like the majority of
commonplace sick people, wanted to talk of his own
malady and symptoms. Still, there was a sort of fellow-
feeling between them, such as even small-pox patients
have for each other. Dorman no longer purposed finan
cial vengeance upon Vane for getting his stock at par
and paying no commission. Nor was Vane sensibly em
bittered against Dorman, although the latter had made
a large fortune out of the Subfluvial, while he himself
had only pocketed a beggarly thousand or two.

"It's the cursed unfairness of the thing that yerks me,"
the lobbyist complained. "Now isn't it too bad that the
public should want to haul our job over the hottest kind
of coals, when ever so many other jobs just like it ain't
spoken of?"

We must remark here, what the reader has doubtless
already noticed, that there was something disappointing
in this creature's conversation. While his person and de
meanor reminded one of the supernatural castaways of
the lake of fire, his discourse was insignificantly human
and even smacked of a very low down sort of humanity.

"And here I am in it, for almost nothing," sighed Vane,
returning instinctively to his own case. "What sort of a
story are you going to tell, Darius, if they put you on
the stand?" he presently inquired.

"O, I would say anything that would do the most
good," grimaced the lobbyist. "But Sharp means to let
out a few facts; that is, if they crowd him. You see,
Sharp unluckily has a character to nurse. I dare say,
too, he thinks he can stop questions by showing that he
means to answer them," added Dorman, who always
imputed the lowest motives.

221

Thoroughly scared by this information, Vane resolved
to keep off the committee. He went home in the dumps,
wished he had never gone into politics, and meditated
resigning his seat. Perhaps he would have taken this
wholesome step, but he was moved first to consult Olym-
pia about it, and she flatly refused to resign.

"I won't agree to it,. no, never!" she exclaimed, rust
ling in all her silks with indignation. "Why, I have just
fairly got into the best society, and there are all the re
ceptions to come, and the inauguration ball! and the
winter is going to be so gay!"

"O well," stared John, who had not thought to look
at this side of the medal; "but we must stick to boarding,
if we do stay," he capitulated on conditions. "I tell you
the winter ain't going to be gay in Congress, and there
won't be much money lying around loose, and we must
skimp."

Before many days he found cause to pluck up his cour
age a little. He learned that Slowburgh considered him
innocent of evil, meaning, of course, that half of Slow-
burgh which had voted for him. The committee of a
certain association sent him an invitation to lecture be
fore it, and promised that "the appearance of his honest
face on their platform would be the signal of frantic ap
plause." Furthermore, certain newspapers remarked that,
although John Vane was suspected of owning Hen Per
suader stock, he had at least not denied such ownership,
and commented upon the fact as an unusual exhibition
of uprightness and manliness in a Congressman. These
things revived his confidence so much that his mind was
able to work. He saw his game clear before him; he
must get in a "long suit" of frankness. There was a little
trick, which, if skilfully and luckily played, would give
him such a repute for veracity and for just intentions

222

that all the caverns of the Great Subfluvial could not
swallow it. What this happy thought was we shall learn
presently.

Meantime the excitement of the men outside politics
increased. That vast, industrious, decent American pub
lic, which wire-pullers usually regard as having no more
intelligence or moral principle than one of the forces of
nature, showed unmistakably that it possessed much po
litical virtue and some political sense. The discovery
that the so-called slanders against its favorites were, in
all probability, verities, only made it more determined
that those slanders should be investigated. The steady
tempest of its righteous indignation scattered good seed
through Congress, and produced on that upland of states
manship a promising nubbin or two of conscience. An
investigation was ordered, at first under hermetically
sealed conditions, but the popular storm soon blew the
doors open.

The rest we mainly know; the whole alien world of
monarchies, empires, and despotisms knows it; the ca
pacity of republicanism for honest government is every
where being judged by it. In every civilized land on this
planet, thoughtful souls are seeking to divine, by the
light of these and other similar dolorous revelations,
whether it is possible for a democracy to save itself from
the corrupting tyranny of capital. Within our own bor
ders sadder spirits are asking which is the most alluring
spectacle, a free America falling into squandering and
bribery, or a monarchial Prussia ruled by economy and
honesty.

We know how it fared with Christian and Faithful and
Hopeful and Greatheart and other venerated statesmen
who had turned more or less into the ways of Achan and
Ananias. Anxious to clear themselves of an ugly charge,

223

and trusting that the chief manipulator of the Hen Per
suader would be willing to bear their sins in return for
their services, they had flatly denied having taken any
golden eggs out of his abstracting machine. But this
disclaimer left Mr. Simon Sharp under the imputation of
putting said eggs into his own pocket, and so plundering
his partners in the enterprise of making the national hen
lay on indefinitely. Being a man of exact arithmetical
instincts, and of inveterate, ingrained business habits, he
revolted from such an unfair allotment of the dividends
of dishonor, and insisted that every one should take his
own share and no more. To the astonishment of every
body, he told a story as straight and searching as a
ploughman's furrow; and we will venture to say that no
American was proud of the unexpected skeletons which
it turned up. There was a time when every fair political
reputation reminded us of the Arabian oil-jars, each one
of which held a robber; when it seemed as if we should
have to concede that our legislative temple was but a
den of thieves, sadly given to lying. It was a new and
perversely reversed and altogether bedevilled rendering
of the Pilgrims Progress into American politics; it was
much as if Bunyan had at the last pitched his Christian
and Hopeful into the little lurid hole which led from the
gate of Zion to the pit. Nothing could well be more sub
verting and confounding and debilitating to the moral
sense, unless it might be to see silver Demas and filthy
Muckrake welcomed by the shining ones into the Holy
City.

And something similar to this last marvel was not
wanting.

224

carried out

his plan for getting up a new and revised edition of his
character as Honest John Vane.

He let Sharp and Ironrnan go on working for him,
declaring that he was the most upright creature on this
foots tool ? and recommending him as fit to investigate
the very claims of saints to their crowns. But when his
name was read as a member of the committee, he rose
and requested to be excused from serving.

"My reason is simply this/' he said, calmly turning his
honest face and dignified abdomen towards every quar
ter of the house; "I own stock to the amount of one
thousand dollars in the corporation in question. I will
offer no explanations here and now as to my motives in
taking it, because those motives will doubtless be de
manded of me by the committee of investigation. I shall
be happy to appear before it, but I cannot conscientious
ly be a member of it. I trust that the House, and you,
Mr. Speaker, will excuse me."

The Honorable Sharp looked icicles from his arm
chair, and Dorman looked coals of fire from his rear

225

coiner. But as our member sat down there was a gen
eral murmur of perfunctory applause, and by next morn
ing he was newspapered all over as "Honest John Vane."

Still, he was not out of danger. As the rain of fire and
brimstone into the Congressional Sodom continued, and
especially when the blazing flames of investigation began
to light on his own combustible garments, he was in a
state of mind to flee into the mountains and dwell in a
cave. When he appeared before the committee, he did
not look much like one of those just men whose mere
presence can save a wicked city. Moreover, Sharp and
Dorman testified against him to the full extent of their
naughty knowledge. Nevertheless, Vane came out of his
furnace without much of a singeing. He exhibited Dor-
man's receipt of payment for the stock, and triumphantly
remarked that "the document spoke for itself." As for the
thousand dollars which Sharp had refunded to him, he
said that he had always regarded it as a loan, and stood
ready to repay it. As for the singular profitableness of
the investment, well, he had expected it would bring
him in something handsome; it was his habit as a busi
ness man to invest for a profit.

He tried to raise a smile here, turning his genial visage
from one to another of the committee, with an almost
pathetic effort at humor. But the sad synagogue of in
vestigators did not smile back; it had been engaged that
morning in digging graves for some of the fairest repu
tations in politics; for once a body of Congressional Yor-
icks could not appreciate a poor joke.

"What we mainly wish to know,,** hummed and hawed
the worried chairman, "is whether you were aware, at
the time of purchase, that the Hen Persuader was a
branch of the Great Subfluvial corporation."

226

Weathercock John was in dire trouble; if he said "Yes,"
his character and career were ruined; if he said "No/ ?
he was a perjurer. It cost him many seconds of penal
meditation to hit upon that happy dodge known as the
non mi ricordo.

"Gentlemen, I will frankly confess that I did not in
quire so closely as I perhaps should have done into that
point/* he answered, remembering distinctly that he had
not inquired into it at all, but had been told all about
it by Dorman. "I did, however, know that the two com
panies were acting under different and independent char
ters. It seemed fair to infer that investing in one was
not the same thing as investing in the other."

It was done. Congressman Vane had found his own
way out of his entanglements. The committee-men were
ready to rise and salute his escape with benevolent
cheers. How in the name of political human nature could
they want to find guilty their brother lawgiver, brother
worker in the party traces, and, perhaps, brother sinner
in special legislation? They bowed him away from their
operating table with a look which said plainly, We re
joice that we shall not be obliged to amputate your able
and honored head, Mr. Vane.

Only a few people remarked on the shallowness of
this show of innocence. Here was stock sold at par which
was worth three hundred^ which on the day after pur
chase paid a dividend of sixty per cent, and, only a few
weeks later, forty more. How could a legislator and busi
ness man doubt that it was a swindle? How could he
fail to divine that Mr. Sharp's Hen Persuader was but
an adjunct of Mr. Sharp's Great Subfluvial?

But the public, the great, soft-hearted American
public, that public which has compassion on every

227

species of scoundrel, which tries murderers under jury
restrictions warranted to save four-fifths of them,
which cannot see one condemned to death without plead
ing with tears for his noxious life, that forgiving, milk-
and-water public was as mild in its judgment as the com
mittee. It magnified our dishonorable member for not
lying, and exalted his name for not committing perjury.
What a pity, said this lamblike public which was so bent
on getting itself fleeced to the skin, what a pity that
our other shepherds could not have used the shears with
a steadier hand and avoided snipping off their own fin
gers! In contrast to these unlucky and somewhat ridicu
lous bunglers, what a straightforward, workmanlike, ad
mirable creature was "Honest John Vane."

And so he escaped all exposure that could injure him
in the eyes of a community of humanitarians, and all
punishment that could hurt a man whose conscience lay
solely in the opinions of others. Even the Subfluvial peo
ple did not follow him up vindictively; they admired him
so much for his ability in sneaking that they could not
hate him; moreover,, they considered that he might still
be useful. Not long after Vane's escape from the com
mittee, he held with Dorman one of those friendly col
loquies which rogues are capable of when it no longer
pays to quarrel.

"What a horrid scrape Christian and Greatheart have
got themselves into!" observed John, with cheerful self-
complacency. "Why couldn't those fellows have told a
straight story?"

"Half -honesty is cursed poor policy," smirked the lob
byist. "After all, those chaps are the cleanest-handed of
the whole gang. They wanted to make an actual invest
ment, something that would show like a fair business

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transaction, just to ease their consciences. The real
sharpers took greenbacks and kept their names off paper.
Do you suppose that the committee is raking up the
Subfluvial to the bottom? Why, our very first move, the
mere getting our charter through, cost us half a million.
We have paid out hundreds of thousands to men against
whom we haven't a particle of proof beyond our verbal
statements."

"Exactly/* nodded Vane, who had long since heard as
much. "Well, do you mean to swear in these things?"

"Of course we don't," Dorman chuckled. "We know
enough not to kill the goose that lays our golden eggs."

"So much the worse for the Greatheart lot," inferred
Weathercock John. "They will have to go out, I sup
pose."

"Don't you believe it," scoffed the lobbyist. "I can tell
you exactly how this thing is sure to come out. There
will be a one-legged report, somebody giving bribes,
but none of the takers guilty of being bribed, like a
gambling case in which only one of the players is a
gambler. Then, if the public excitement keeps up, a
couple or so will be picked out as scapegoats, to bear
off the sins of the congregation. This report will be so
manifestly unfair that it can't help rousing opposition.
As soon as it appears, a debate will be arranged. All the
old war-horses will gallop up and down among charges,
counter-charges, precedents, and points of law, raising
such a dust that the public won't be able to see what is
going on. When the dust clears away, it will be found
that nobody is expelled. The two scapegoats will be al
most expelled, but not quite. It will be like the pig going
through the crooked hollow log and always coming out
on his own side of the fence. Then the wire-pullers at

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home will take a hand in the job. All the convicted chaps
will have receptions got up for them in their districts,
and be whitewashed all over with resolutions expressing
unshaken confidence. You won't have any reception,
John. You are not far gone enough to need such vigorous
treatment. Your case is lobby varioloid, instead of lobby
small-pox."

Vane felt somewhat offended at this plain speaking,
for it is a curious fact that he had not lost his self-esteem;
but, looking at matters in his habitual profit-and-loss
way,, he decided that wrath would bring him in nothing.

"Take care of yourself, Dorman," he said, with a tran
quil good nature which did him dishonor. "If I owned
a million of your style of property, I shouldn't feel rich.
There'll be suits against your inside corporation."

"I'm out of it," replied the lobbyist, flashes of cunning
dancing about his sooty eyes, as sparks run over the back
of a foul fireplace. "I have failed."

For the life of him, and notwithstanding the long-
faced decorum which sham honesty requires, John Vane
could not help laughing. The fact that a financier should
declare himself bankrupt the moment he saw himself in
danger of being called on to refund his swindlings, did
not strike our self-taught legislator as a very disgusting
exhibition of rascality, but as a very amusing bit of
cleverness.

"But you're going to hang around here, I hope," he
added, unwilling to lose a trickster who had been help
ful, and might be so again.

"No, I am going back" said Dorman, in a tone which
would have been significant of forebodings and horrors
to any soul less carnal than a sparerib. His face, too,
was strange; it had an unusually seared, cindered, and

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smoke-stained look; one would have said that the cuticle
was drying up with inward heat. If that scorched en
velope had cracked open, and the creature within had
bounced forth in some different hide, or in a raw-head-
and-bloody-bones state of nudity, there would have been
no great cause of wonderment. But Congressman Vane
saw nothing remarkable; he simply inquired, with calm,
oleaginous interest, "Going back where?"

"Where I came from," grimaced Donnan, and disap
peared abruptly, either by stepping briskly around a
corner, or by slipping under a flagstone.

Not in the least disturbed by this singular circum
stance, and,, indeed, altogether failing to perceive any
thing noteworthy in it, Weathercock John marched on
majestically to the Capitol, and commenced his day's
work of statesmanship.

Well, there he is still, a lawgiver to this tax-burdened
people, and ex-officio a director of its finances. As soon
as he has recovered from his present slight scare, he will
resume his labor (the only legislative labor which he
knows much about) of enacting the national revenue into
the safes of huge corporations and into the hats of indi
vidual mendicants, for the sake of a small percentage
thereof to himself. Can nothing be done to stop him,
or at least to shackle and limit him, in his damaging in
dustry? Can we not wrest from him and from his brother
knaves or dunces this fearfully abused privilege of voting
the public money for other objects than the carrying on
of the departments of the government? Can we not
withdraw altogether from Congress the power of aiding
corporations and schemers out of an income which is
contributed by all for the equal benefit of all? Can we
not provide, for instance, that, if a man has a claim for

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injuries to property against the United States, he shall
prosecute that claim in the courts?

Such men as John Vane will inevitably find their way
in numbers to the desks of the Capitol. Better and wiser
men than he will be corrupted by a lobby which has
thoroughly learned the easy trick of paying a hundred
thousand out of every stolen million. Nothing in the
future is more certain than that, if this huge "special
legislation" machine for bribery is not broken up, our
Congress will surely and quickly become, what some sad
souls claim that it already is y a den of thieves.

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